VOICES NOT ON ANY MAP: VENTRILOQUISM AND REVOLUTION IN MELVILLE’S BENITO CERENO, “THE BELL-TOWER,” AND THE CONFIDENCE- MAN: HIS MASQUERADE
A Thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
In
English: Literature
by
Mimi Eleni Court
San Francisco, California
Fall 2018 Copyright by Mimi Eleni Court 2018 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL
I certify that I have read VOICES NOT ON ANY MAP: VENTRILOQUISM AND REVOLUTION IN
M E L V IL L E ’S BENITO CERENO, “THE BELL-TOWER” AND THE CONFIDENCE-MAN: HIS
MASQUERADE by Mimi Eleni Court, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Art in English Literature at San Francisco State University.
Sara^Hackenbmj Associate Professor
Beverly Voloshin Professor VOICES NOT ON ANY MAP: VENTRILOQUISM AND REVOLUTION IN MELVILLE’S BENITO CERENO, “THE BELL-TOWER,” AND THE CONF1DENCE-MAN: HIS MASQUERADE
Mimi Eleni Court San Francisco, California 2018
In The Confidence-Man, “The Bell-Tower” and Benito Cereno, Melville develops a whiteface ventriloquism to both study and overturn expectations about how power and inequality get mapped on bodies and in minds. In shadowy tableaus, he showcases black and socially dehumanized characters who wear their apparent servility as masks in order to seize control. Through this whiteface ventriloquism, Melville interrogates how racist and oppressive discourses never accurately name those whom they purport to categorize and explain. Melville points to the irretrievable consciousness of his protagonists, asking the readers to recuperate them from the silence to which the dominant discourse has condemned them. Juxtaposing Melville’s works to articles published simultaneously in Putnam ’s Monthly Magazine o f American Literature, Science and Art allows us to see how Melville creates an indirect, ventriloquized discourse, that forces the readers to decode what is left out of hegemonic narratives in order to discern and make sense of the legalistic and fictitious aspects of race as a construct.
s a correct representation of the content of this thesis.
Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank the generous professors of San Francisco State University whose courses have opened my eyes to the generative possibilities of writing and discourse. I thank my
students, children, and friends for the daily reminders they give me of goodness and brilliance in the collaborative insurgencies of our present. TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures...... vi
Introduction...... 1
Chapter 1 Raving about things that could never have happened: Seizing the Master’s Voice in Benito Cereno and “The Bell-Tower”
...... 23
Chapter 2 The Confidence-Man’s Masquerades: Uninvented Games, Common Justice, and the Metaphysics of Producing Whiteness and Blackness ...... 53
Works Cited 93 vii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figures Page
1. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper...... 85 It is not down in any map; true places never are.
(Herman Melville, Moby-Dick)
The soldier once more spoke; in a tone of suggestive dubiety addressing at
once his associates and Captain Vere: “Nobody is present—none of the
ship's company, I mean-who might shed lateral light, if any is to be had,
upon what remains mysterious in this matter.”
(Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor)
Is ventriloquism a weapon of revolution? For Herman Melville - in his works which dramatize moments of antebellum insurgency - ventriloquism allows him to expose and overturn expectations about how power and inequality get mapped on bodies and in minds. Whereas in Moby-Dick, Melville imagines uncolonized places that are not on any map, in Benito Cereno, “The Bell-Tower,” and The Confidence-Man: His
Masquerade he crafts whiteface masquerades, where both the voices and the bodies of free black characters are masked and unknowable within the discourse and text as articulated by the white male narrator. Yet, these free but masked voices and bodies beckon — like the uncanny figure of the cloaked Haman in “The Bell-Tower,” and the skeleton of Aranda in Benito Cereno — to relationships and modes of being which are not
“in any map.” In this thesis, I argue that Melville develops a whiteface ventriloquism in order to investigate the inequalities structured through race in Antebellum America.
Melville showcases black and socially dehumanized laboring characters who deliberately 2
exploit their apparent servility in order to seize power. The subaltern characters he develops find ways to speak through white characters, who retain the appearance of being their masters. Through this whiteface ventriloquism operated by subaltern characters,
Melville interrogates how racist and oppressive discourses never accurately name those whom they purport to categorize and explain.
By presenting servitude as a mask, and by collapsing differences between white and black bodies, Melville’s dramas sound “the structure of subjection” within all narrative with the aim, like that articulated by Achille Mbembe in Critique o f Black
Reason and Gayatri Spivak in A Critique o f Postcolonial Reason, of representing ontological truths that are “not on any map,” or in the words of Mbembe, “to find the truth of the self no longer outside of the self but standing on its own ground” (29).
Prompted by the reversals and silences of Melville’s whiteface masquerades, readers can begin to decode and envision those “voices not on any map,” effectively liberating the tale of the subaltern from the narratives of subjection that erased them. Melville focuses on how narrative and language can be used to categorially oppress others. However, through the ambiguous structure and ventriloquist masquerades of his narratives he also encodes the potential that these laboring and enslaved others may one day liberate themselves (this potential is the foundational repressed fear carried by whiteness, a fear so foundational that Melville’s text never speaks it directly). What would whiteness be without the blackness which constitutes it? Melville’s narratives trouble the very definition of whiteness and oppression, class and liberation, showing that the terms 3
themselves exist within an order built upon fundamental falsehoods, ignorance, silence, and confusion.
In Critique o f Black Reason, Achille Mbembe argues that blackness and race appear as “foundational” and “delirious” structures in the era of modernity and that the black man “is the one (or the thing) that one sees when one sees nothing, when one understands nothing, and, above all, when one wishes to understand nothing” (2). For
Mbembe, the process of creating a subaltern person (a nonperson, a person excluded) begins with a process which denies them a voice in court:
The loss of the right to appear in court turned the Black individual into a
nonperson from a juridical standpoint. To this juridical mechanism was added a
series of slave codes, often developed in the aftermaths of slave uprisings. (19)
Throughout his work, Melville dramatizes how racialized subjects are constructed through fiction, performance, and social (and legal) judgments. Thus, when Melville chooses to end Benito Cereno, with a legal deposition he produces a fictional work of documentary realism, which draws attention to the blind spots and ellipses of political rhetoric as it engages black and laboring bodies, encouraging readers to investigate both the specter of a slave revolt and the process which strips a set of people of their rights as humans “like all others” (48).' Readers are even more implicated in the process of
1 Jordan Peele describes his 2017 film, Get Out, as a social thriller and documentary. With its sudden revelations and reversals of power structures between blacks and whites, Melville’s Benito Cereno can also be read as a social thriller, which as Michael Rogin argues in Subversive Genealogy, is “realist in its attention to political rhetoric” (41) and which “invites strategies of unmasking [which] leave standing 4
judgment on board the Fidele in The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade when we witness the specter of a drum-head court being enacted by the passengers interpellated into figuring out how to judge Black Guinea.
“ Transforming the man into a block, or a loaded cannon Commodifying Race
Melville’s insurgencies figure through “shadowy tableaus” that seek to be
“explosive” enough to “break the web of mystification” that circles around the question of race and who counts as a full human being within the private and public discourses of
neither the work of art as reflection nor the reality it was supposed to describe” (23). The work of contemporary African American humorists and public intellectuals producing social thrillers which satirically stage the trouble of thinking (and living) race - such as the work of Dave Chappelle, Spike Lee, and Jordan Peele — provide a useful contemporary frame for studying Melville’s work in The Confidence- Man and Benito Cereno. Journalist and public intellectual, Shaun Scott, a writer for Seattle’s City Arts Magazine draws connections between the comedian Dave Chappelle’s code-switching routine - as well as the ambiguities and burn-out that come from speaking truth to power — and Melville’s The Confidence- Man: Like a jazzman without a horn, Chappelle’s code-switching routine moves from profound to profane, reflecting the local idioms and vulgarities of the great American vernacular. As a narrator, Chappelle is the elusive, nameless protagonist of Herman Melville’s 1857 novel The Confidence-Man—a character who changes his identity from one page to the next: pimp, historian, sports commentator, activist and ultimately comic. This is 21st-century Americana.
http://www.cityartsmatiazine.com/price-watchiniJ-dave-chappelle/
Scott’s argument helps see the popular aspects of both Chappelle’s and Melville’s work within the canon of Americana dedicated to ventriloquizing and subverting racism. Spike Lee’s film, Blackkklansman, presents the revolutionary potential of whiteface ventriloquism at the same time that he develops a reflexive lens in this social thriller which points back to the viewer, ending as it does not with the fictional account of a black man infiltrating the KKK through the operations of white voice and whiteface, but with contemporary news footage from Charlottesville, VA circa 2017. In its whiteface ventriloquism and its final “deposition” in the form of real news footage, Blackkklansman echoes how ventriloquism interpolates the reader to deconstruct the discourses of whiteness that Melville constructs in Benito Cereno. 5
the day (BC 118; McNally 6). Within the discourses of race and humanity of his time,
Melville’s whiteface ventriloquism operates on two main levels. On the first level, whiteface operates within the fictions themselves as characters and narrators don masks of servitude in order to manipulate the voices and understanding of people who have power over them. Because the society in which they live codes their bodies and skins as a sign of being subhuman and subaltern, they need to seize the bodies and larynxes of white characters in order to become free agents and take a stab at exercising hegemony in their own terms. Thus, in Melville’s tales, ventriloquist masquerades become a method by which the disenfranchised can cast their voices to defy the limits of their own bodies by speaking through bodies the society allows to exercise dominance. The reversals that
Melville’s characters create reveal and interrupt modernity’s maps of mankind, its
“structures of denial” which are structured along diacritics of race and class (McNally 6).
On the second level, whiteface appears in Melville’s satirical interventions into ideology and the reproduction of culture as they appeared in the sociological, political, and economic discourses of the day, notably in the vernacular of periodicals such as Putnam’s
Monthly Magazine in which Melville regularly published.
As the narrator seeks to convey the influences Captain Delano may be under when he first boards the San Dominick, the reader learns that “both house and ship—the one by its walls and blinds, the other by its high bulwarks like ramparts—hoard from view their interiors till the last moment” (BC 118). Both houses and ships, in this formula, have exteriors which effectively guard and hide the individual “living 6
spectacles” within. But, for Melville, a ship differs from a house because of the “blank ocean which zones it.” This blankness gives the ship “something of the effect of enchantment.” The ship appears as a theatrical realm, an “unreal” realm of “living spectacle,” of “strange costumes, gestures, and faces,” of “shadowy tableau.” This space is also revelatory space. Both houses and ships are shown to “hoard from view their interiors” but, nevertheless, those interiors reveal themselves “at the last moment” and “in sudden and complete disclosure” (BC 118). With the shadowy portents -- twitches, tremors, doubts, and confusions — which punctuate Delano’s experience along with the sudden unveiling of the slave revolt, and the inclusion of the final deposition, Melville encourages readers to witness the “strange costumes, gestures, and faces” of the theatrical realm which is the law. Not only does he establish a gap between what one sees and what one hears, and one’s judgment of it, but he creates literary predicaments where readers face the complexity of their own responses to and readings of openly racist discourse. For those readers who have imbibed the precepts of white supremacy — whether a
“gentlemanly” version portrayed by Delano, or a more outwardly angry and emphatic one
— the contrast between dismissive racist discourse and the disruptive reality of a slave revolt creates a cognitive dissonance, highlighting the incorrectness of the view that sees black characters as incapable of the very revolt they have just exercised. Thus, Melville presents a world where race is both beside and beyond being, a category unable to contain the ontological completion of the full characters on board The San Dominick. 7
Melville, through Delano, points to how a role (and skin color) can change a person into a machine or commodity. Delano describes how leadership operates,
“transforming the man into a block, or rather into a loaded cannon, which, until there is call for thunder, has nothing to say” (BC 127-8). However “conscientious” leaders may be, normative policies and roles (“more or less adopted by all commanders of large ships”) can be pushed to an “unhealthy” extreme which “obliterates ... the manifestation of...every trace of sociality.”2 In this description of a commander turned into a block or cannon, we have another instance of seeing how those in power become shackled by their role. Readers are presented with an emerging doubt about how order operates on all levels of humanity, from commander to slave, from white to black. But we are also set up to see what Delano cannot yet see, which is the degree to which Benito Cereno is a puppet playing the role of master just as Delano is a puppet playing the role of knight or squire within a system of multiple oppressions.
As readers seek to understand what is happening on board the San Dominick, we have Delano’s miss-readings as our only guide to decoding the mysterious tableaux he describes. Readers can extrapolate outward from this observation about men transformed into blocks or cannons to ask what role has produced this constitutive blindness in
Delano. Simultaneously, we can see parallels between how Delano dismisses and denies signs of a slave revolt and how the tribunal dismisses Benito Cereno’s testimony as
2 We will see this same discourse of a “man apart” in the Metaphysics of Indian Hating that Melville develops in The Confidence-Man. 8
“rav[ings] about things that could never have happened.” Denial and psychic derangement are key elements in the dramas which Melville composes. Throughout
Melville draws attention to how racial and labor politics transform people into “blocks,” or “loaded cannons,” which have nothing to say except when violence is needed, thundering out orders to keep the normative ontological economy in line. The other side of this coin lies in those silenced by the thundering cannons. Babo’s silent head and the silent tableau of Haman-in-revolt reflect aspects of the black and silent head upon whose body and labor an entire economy is built.3 The presence of black and commodified bodies in Melville’s texts reveals all that is most secret and elided in modernity, which is that its freedoms -- indeed whiteness itself — are built on and through slavery and exploitation, through defining blackness and by producing bodies excluded from discourse. In battle scenes in Benito Cereno, Melville describes “lolling tongues” and
“savagery” in the black faces and bodies seen through Delano’s eyes. But, juxtaposed
3 In Melville’s works, the bodies and heads of the whales — as well as the bodies and heads of black people — fit as commodities in the discourse and thus as delirium. Passages in Melville’s Moby-Dick, Benito Cereno, “The Bell-Tower, " and The Confidence-Man illustrate how Melville toys with the foundational delirium and silence surrounding blackness in white imaginaries. Themes of a silent, black, hooded head appear in Moby-Dick, in a passage which connects the silence of an all-knowing black body with its commodification upon which entire exploitative economies are built. The passage points to what blackness could share if it spoke if it only had language:
It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx's in the desert. “Speak, thou vast and venerable head,” muttered Ahab, speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations.... O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!” (Moby-Dick 249)
This “black and hooded” head does not speak — but if it could it would be able to speak of vast truths. 9
with the tableaux of black, silenced, and hooded heads and bodies these scenes of human bodies in duress raise more questions and trouble than can be contained by the text.
In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison studies “the invention and development of whiteness ... in the construction of what is loosely described as “American,” and “the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it”
(11). She points to “the paucity of critical material on this large and compelling subject” signaling that “ in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse” (15). When Morrison describes the foreclosure of knowledge — and the
“liberal,” “graceful” and “generous” gesture and “well-bred instinct” which “argues against noticing ” blackness and black agency as well as the violence levied against black people (15), she could be read as offering a direct analysis of the mind-set Melville portrays via Delano’s “indulgent” interpretations and misinterpretations regarding Benito
Cereno’s “reserve,” and “disorderly conduct” on board the San Dominick.
In Benito Cereno and “The Bell-Tower,” in his depiction of the discourse and vision of white narrators and magistrates responding to slave revolts, Herman Melville like Morrison examines “the impact of racism on those [white men] who perpetuate it.”
He examines the effects of racism on Benito Cereno, and on Amasa Delano, but also the effects of dehumanizing and criminalizing structures on readers. Showing how racist tropes and mindsets essentially animalize, dehumanize, and criminalize bodies and beings based on physical characteristics, Melville draws a parallel between dehumanized workers and slaves, showing specifically how mean employment and guilt can be 10
mobilized to blacken and criminalize a character. He also shows how a savvy manager, magistrate, or playwright - in this case Babo, the decolonized playwright— can play upon doubts to foment separations, silence dialogue, and criminalize individuals.
"Matter which slowed our judgment”: Melville's Troubling Method
Juxtaposing Melville’s works to articles published simultaneously in Putnam’s
Monthly Magazine o f American Literature, Science and Art in the 1850s allows us to see how Melville reframes the way race, slavery, and the voices and agency of black people were simultaneously romanticized and demonized within popular discourse. All the writing in Putnam 's in the 1850s overtly engaged race as a topic of debate and discussion. In that context, what should we make of the more ambivalent treatment of race in Benito Cereno, “The Bell-Tower,” and The Confidence-Man, in which seemingly authoritative narrators are scrutinized and in which race becomes just one of many faulty and limited epistemological categories?
Letters publishers wrote to Melville provide insight into some of the decorum and care that needed to be taken in order to be published. On May 12, 1854, Putnam's editor
Charles F. Briggs wrote that he rejected Melville’s Two Temples, despite their worth, explaining that he had to be “very cautious” and feared “offending the religious sensibilities of the public” (Leyda 487). Though Putnam’s made it clear that they valued
Melville’s work and wanted more of his “good things,” they also taught him that he needed to manage his voice in order to be published. Though Putnam’s publishers feared offending religious sensibilities, they did not shy from addressing questions of race, the 11
nature of mankind and antebellum politics. Further still, Putnam’s publishers leaned ostensibly - as their letters to Melville demonstrate — in the direction of clarity and civility rather than “metaphysics” and troubled or troubling endings.4 The correspondence between Curtis (editor of both Putnam’s and Harper’s) points to the method that Melville developed throughout his stories but particularly to the uncertain manner of his endings and the ambivalent voices of his narrators. We can see that
Melville’s ambivalent works confounded readers, causing some of his manuscripts to be
4 A note on the term “metaphysics” as used here. In his letters, Curtis sets up a binary opposition between commerce and metaphysics. In the rejection letter Curtis wrote to Melville in 1854, he begins with a “family” story about Harper’s which reflects some of the tone and ethos of stories the confidence-man relates to his marks. Curtis had received marching orders from “The Major” — Fletcher Harper, one of the four founders of the House of Harper — via a memorandum dated May 27, 1854 to reject Melville and to “remind him who Harper’s readers are.” Curtis pens a polite rejection of Melville’s stories claiming they are too difficult to understand: “The test of an article’s excellence is if it tells its own story clearly and requires no explanation” (Brenner: 113). Instead, Melville’s stories “confound” - as “The Major” had written in his memorandum to Curtis: “ Confound it if I can make anything out of it” (Brenner: 112). Curtis cites also the authority of the House of Harper which have come to agreement about what counts. And, Melville’s genre of obfuscation does not fit. As the letter continues, we get to the counting house core of the matter as: Mr. Fletcher Harper ... soberly commanded, “Questions of morals, doubtful words or allusions, and double meanings have no place, no place at all, in our pages.” He was seconded by The Colonel, Brother John: “Our commodity is merchandise, not metaphysics.” Often, during my first year, holding aloft some manuscript, the Major would declaim — to the air or to anyone within earshot -- “Who is supposed to read This? Our subscribers? The People? The plain people? Or somebody else’s subscribers? Philosophers and poets? Confound it! Why can’t authors show readers good family courtesy?” (Brenner 113). Curtis demonstrates wonderful skill in painting a picture of the Harper’s family in language and image. Yet, he is only speaking from half of his sensibility. He will later declare that he chafes at and resists the commercialism of his editorial role. In his second letter, he confesses to Melville “in confidence” that he “grow[s] restive at the commercialism” of his employers. Adding, in parentheses that he shudders at Harper’s resistance to “metaphysics”: (Would that you could witness the slight shudder of my frame upon hearing Mr. Fletcher Harper’s predictable rejoinders; when, for instance, suddenly flanked in a colloquy on the score of moral issues, he invariably fires off, with self-satisfied jocosity, “If you come to metaphysics, I can’t follow you.”) (Brenner 114) It appears to follow that it is because Melville “comes to metaphysics” that Curtis appreciates his work. 12
rejected. Yet, with further study, it is precisely this confounding style that contains the power of his work.
In 1854 and 1855, G. W. Curtis (who was editor of both Harper’s and Putnam’s at the time,) wrote a series of letters to Herman Melville. Curtis wrote both in his official capacity as editor — in rejection letters sent from Harper’s — and as a fellow intellectual in private letters he wrote after regretting his editorial rejection letter. The early part of
Curtis’ editorial responses to Melville show that he was critical of the “dreary documents at the end” of Benito Cereno and of the last 2/5ths of “The Bell-Tower. ” Yet, later, in the personal letter he pens to Melville regarding “The Bell-Tower,” we hear the words of a man who has been worked upon by the story, and who has questioned his earlier judgments. In his first Editorial, “The Easy Chair,” Curtis indicated that the final “two- fifths” of the story were sloppy addendums, demonstrating laziness (or worse) “cliches” on the part of the author. Curtis notes that the tale itself -- in “summary” — “enchains and enchants” but regrets that “it unravels itself for several more pages.” He exclaims that, in those last pages, “there is ...matter which slowed our judgment.” The passive construction
— “there is matter” — and the multiple meanings of the word “judgment” point to the discomfort that Melville’s tale was designed to elicit. The part of the tale that “slowed judgment” and prompted Curtis to reject the tale is precisely the part of the tale where the
Magistrates cover up Bannadonna’s murder, throwing Haman into the sea. Though Curtis appears to use the word judgment to signify his ability to comprehend and discern meaning, the ultimate (and, repressed) meaning of judgment signifying something that 13
happens in court to determine guilt or innocence remains the very thing that is slowed - thereby judgment itself becomes an object of investigation as the reader grapples with ambivalence in the tale. The reader is put in the position of doubting the Magistrates for how they overlook and cover up the murders of workers and the narrator for how s/he allows the incomplete tale, so full of gaps, to stand on its own.
In Curtis’ personal letter to Melville he confesses that he has been “bewitched” by
Melville’s tale. He points to a potentially “revolutionary intention” in Melville, as well as the romance and doubt (what he calls “the inebriating webs”) of the writer’s quest, and the bewitching uncertainties of knowledge (Brenner 124). In this second letter, Curtis acknowledges that “The Bell-Tower’s” power lies precisely in its “refusal to permit [him] to fix it in some collector’s box.” After reflecting on the degree to which Melville allows his narrator “to pretend to be an all-knowing teller” while all the while displaying his ignorance, Curtis surmises that Melville’s intention is to show the gap between narration and the real — revealing “the utter incongruity” between the cliches of the narrator and the tale itself. Thus, it is precisely the troubling parts of the tale — those parts which
“slowed judgment” — which sparked deeper epistemological questioning, causing Curtis to interpret the work more deeply, and to investigate Melville’s intentions.
As Curtis experienced reading Melville’s ambivalent tale “The Bell-Tower,”
Melville’s works Benito Cereno, “The Bell-Tower,” and The Confidence-Man: His
Masquerade can be read as mysteries where crimes have occurred on both psychologic 14
and ideological planes. Like the text of Billy Budd, Sailor which invites readers to experience how difficult it is to be detectives when defendants are tongue-tied, and where no clear light has been shed on the matter at hand, the texts of Benito Cereno, “The Bell-
Tower,” and The Confidence-Man structure mysteries which readers can never entirely disclose or decode. Melville’s focus on the limited and often hypocritical points of view of his narrators and characters reveals the individual’s - and by extension the culture’s— impressed inability to see, think and speak outside of sanctioned, hegemonic discourse.
The work of the reader becomes that of riddling out the mechanisms not only of the inexorable wheels of plot, of the rigged trials showcasing the subaltern defendant’s discursive defeats, but also witnessing the limits of how the narrator sees, and why culturally and ideologically he is impressed to see that way. By implication, and in the painful process of deciphering the “lasting tongue-tie,” the coded hints, and the
“suggestive dubiety” of Melville’s craft, readers may learn to see our own ideological blinders and shackles and perhaps imagine possibilities not in any map.
By highlighting the violent elisions of civil discourse, Melville troubles how human identities are mapped and categorized. In Benito Cereno and “The Bell-Tower,”
Melville encodes stories of revolution and oppression which place readers in the role of detectives trying to piece together what the text cannot say. His method of turning readers into detectives is even more explicit in The Confidence-Man where the text explicitly implicates the reader as a mark to be exploited just as the confidence men onboard The
Fidele endeavor to exploit passengers. In order to make sense of the central mysteries of 15
the tales Melville concocts, readers need to resurrect voices which remain unvoiced in the narrative. With his oblique style of narration, his focus on misperception and unreliable narrators, and the uncertain revelations of the tableaus he crafts, we can see Melville creating fictions that mirror the civility and decorum of his times all the while encoding insurrectionary possibilities, through black and hooded figures that haunt the certainties of hegemonic discourse. Melville develops narrative structures and dialogues that endeavor to “slow judgment,” to give pause, or “work like certain potions do” subtly influencing readers (CM 51).
Throughout his oeuvre, Melville points to the fantasy of disclosure but his narratives remain ambiguous about what exactly they disclose. Both self-conscious and self-reflexive, Benito Cereno, “The Bell-Tower,” and The Confidence-Man ask the reader to riddle out what cannot be known. Though Melville plays with notions of “sudden and complete disclosure,” he also deals frankly in the business of partial and faulty mis readings, in the business of disguise and manipulation. He demonstrates the operative mechanisms of ideology, pointing to how individuals parrot or ventriloquize the voices of others, both voluntarily and involuntarily, both consciously and unconsciously. Melville’s dramas insert “suggestive dubiety” into the epistemological frameworks present in
Putnam’s, seeking to exercise an insurgency on the mindsets of readers.
The Subaltern Speaks Through Ventriloquist Acts 16
To study ventriloquism in Melville’s works is to address questions of narrative voice as Melville experimented with it in order to perform (and disrupt) how race and racism speak. Melville’s ventriloquism performs insurgency much in the way that Gayatri
Spivak in both A Critique o f Postcolonial Reason and “Can the Subaltern Speak?” deconstructs the power relations and narrative structures - “the philosophical presuppositions, historical excavations, and literary representations of the dominant”
(Spivak:xi) — which undergird both rebellion and oppression. In these works, Gayatri
Spivak examines the question of the other in relation to the self in terms of foreclosed relations. She traces how “representations of the dominant” connect to “a subliminal and discontinuous emergence of the “native informant”: autochtone and/or subaltern”
{Critique xi). Like Mbembe and Melville, when Spivak tracks “the native informant,” she looks for the “emergent” being who is possible, but never entirely exists in the discourse.
Her hunting metaphor — she is “tracking” — and her focus on the investigator’s role reflect Melville’s treatment of the gentleman magistrates in “The Bell-Tower,” and the officials in Benito Cereno, as well as all the “hunters after all these hunters” in The
Confidence-Man, all of whom are shown to create themselves at the moment that they silence and repress the “native informant,” the revolutionary figure, and the other within the Master’s tunic (Critique xi; CM 10).
Following Spivak, if we focus on Melville’s development of Babo, Haman, and the confidence men as so many ‘texts for knowledge,’ and if we say that both Masters and Revolutionaries can be seen as operating versions of insurgency, who receives their 17
insurgency? Unpacking Melville’s stories we encounter a fundamental doubt about who is behind the masque/mask being performed. We hit a place where the discourse cannot speak the ontological difference that a revolutionary figure represents. As Spivak argues,
“When we come to the concomitant question of the consciousness of the subaltern, the notion of what the work cannot say becomes important” (82). She shows how rather than focusing on “the utterance” of the revolutionary subaltern’s voice, the ‘social text” plays out “elaborations” of how the “insurgency” happen(ed). These elaborations “stand in the place of ‘the utterance’.” By the same token, the narratives of insurgency that Melville presents perform elaborations of how the insurgency happened but the work cannot say anything about the interiority of the insurgents. In this move, the consciousness of the insurgent is relegated to an off-scene/literally ob-scene place, pointed to as something that cannot be retrieved or known. Melville’s revolutionaries - like “the sender” in
Spivak -- are “marked only as a pointer to an irretrievable consciousness” (Spivak82).
Thus, the erased figure becomes a centrally powerful figure in both Spivak and Melville.
Melville points to an “irretrievable consciousness” in his protagonists, asking the readers to recuperate them from the silence to which the narrator (and the dominant discourse) have condemned them. If silence is the realm of the subaltern, ventriloquism is the realm of the subaltern subverted, the subaltern made vocal.
In Melville’s masquerades, he stages doubt through masks, doubles, and ventriloquism in order to point to voices and beings not yet mapped. Voice and ventriloquism, masks and doubles are never far from the theory and practice Melville 18
puts into play in his shadowy tableaux. In Mbembe’s formula, racism operates as a belief system which obscures the vision of real human individuals, covering the real person with a veil that hides their humanity and thereby renders them accessible to domination and oppression: “A real human face comes into view. The work of racism consists in relegating it to the background or covering it with a veil” (32). In his stories, Melville takes this veil which forecloses insurgency (Spivak) and which hides a real human face
(Mbembe) and dramatizes the act which both produces that veil and uses it as an obfuscating cover. Melville shows the act and desire of covering itself via the shadowy tableaux elaborated in Benito Cereno, The Bell-Tower, and The Confidence-Man allowing readers to see how racism works to:
replace this face by calling up, from the depths of the imagination, a ghost of a
face, a simulacrum of a face, a silhouette that replaces the body and face of a
human being. Racism consists, most of all, in substituting what is with something
else, with another reality. (32)
Melville shows the act of veiling as a self-serving act of oppression and effectively points the lens back to the replaced body and the replaced face, compelling readers to uncover the act of covering, to speak the act that has been silenced, and to imagine other possibilities beyond the silencing violence of the exploitative enterprises he portrays. He creates a claustrophobic world which can only see through the lens of its narrators — who appear to be so invested in the hegemonic discourse that they are blind to the real — in order to get readers, in the words of Geoffrey Sanborn in The Sign o f the Cannibal “to 19
recognize that savagery is produced, both by the acts of the “savage” and the expectations of the “humane” (Sanborn xv). It is precisely at this place of the relationship between the reader’s reception of and reaction to the dramas on board the San Dominick, the Fidele, and within Bannadonna’s titanic tower that the true trouble begins. It is here, as readers witness larynxes being usurped, and powerful discriminatory legal violence being passed down word for word in the voice of another, that we enter a realm of mystification which
Melville performs - and thereby dissects— in his works.
In the gap between the name and the human “who is asked to shoulder it,”
Mbembe points to the place where, like Spivak, he sees room for subjects to “radicalize” and speak themselves outside of a subaltern status (46). In its simplest and most straightforward sense, Melville’s masquerades are dramas in which the nickname and tunic given to the performer becomes a burden the colonizers and liberal subjects have to either radicalize or bear. A cosmopolitan mixed identity appears throughout Melville’s works, in counter-step and double to the fantasy of a homogenous West which exists as a
“world apart” rather than in relation to the Others it fabricates and enforces. In showing the gap between the intended meaning of the nickname and the human person asked to shoulder it, Melville cannot go further than revealing the gap.
The entire drama of The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, and the confidence- man in his various sketches, as well as the dramas put into play by Babo and the
Colonialists, who eventually murder him, represent complex masquerades that query revolution and counter-revolution. The confidence-man, unlike the on-stage semi-silence 20
(and the off-scene voice of) Babo, is verbose, spinning tales and identities in response to the plots and operations he stages. But, as himself, the “operator,” his interior world and voice never appear in the text. Both Babo and all the incarnations of the confidence-man have voices, thus, that do not appear on any map knowable to the world of the narration.
They are that which is by definition apart, that which cannot be included. The collaboration, which would see every individual included as full human beings without the nickname of master or servant, would operate a revolution not yet known or mapped.
Where does such equality exist? In which map? By pointing to the possibility of an off- scene equality, Melville reveals the faulty and partial nature of existing knowledge, holding out a kind of dubious hope shot through with skepticism that we might revolutionize our thinking as well as our society.
The real human face of the confidence-man never appears in the text - but doubles and simulacrum abound. A reader may come to fill in the absences and silences of
Melville’s texts to get to the real character of Babo, Haman/the workers, Black Guinea, or the confidence-men onboard the Fidele, but the text provides nothing more than descriptions of the disguises each wears and the silences of the narratives which elaborate their insurgencies. These characters represent only “a sign” and an “operation of the imagination” and “an encounter with the shadows and hidden zones of the unconscious.”
Babo, Haman, and Black Guinea are all displayed by Melville as representing what blackness itself represents in modernity, according to Mbembe, “a caricature of the principle of exteriority” (46). Mbembe’s notion of an “uneliminable surplus” helps 21
illuminate the off-seene referentiality of Melville’s characters. Mbembe argues that within “the world apart” to which they have been systematically relegated, subaltern characters “produce ways of thinking and languages that were truly their own” (48).
These “ways of thinking and languages that were truly their own” appear only obliquely within Melville’s narration. And, yet, they are there ontologically, ready to be seen and ready to speak.
Structure o f the Thesis
In Chapter 1, Raving about things that could never have happened: Seizing the
Master’s Voice in Benito Cereno and “The Bell-Tower,” I situate Melville’s Benito
Cereno and “The Bell-Tower” within other texts in Putnam’s Monthly to highlight how
Melville crafts mysteries and masques which intervene in the antebellum discourses of his day —their hypocrisies, silences, and repressions -- in ways that are critically resistant of slavery and white supremacy. Because Melville’s narrative structures draw attention to how both white characters and black characters exist as hollow caricatures in a pantomime of civility, they also point to the real possibility that white and black individuals can radicalize and transform their identities and roles. Rather than merely ventriloquizing hegemonic discourse (Babo, Delano) or being silenced (Babo, workers,
Haman), they can seize their own vocal chords and beings in quest of a new, as yet unwritten, and unmapped narrative. 22
In Chapter 2, “The Confidence-Man’s Masquerades: Uninvented Games,
Common Justice, and the Metaphysics of Producing Whiteness and Blackness, ” I study how Melville enacts a ventriloquism, which both theorizes hegemony and ideology and disrupts its mystifications. Structurally the text represents both a performance and an interruption, pointing readers back to the centrality of how race and racism speaks.
Melville puts readers and passengers in the role of judges, asking us not to “stand by” and have our “fellow-feelings touched” by an alleged criminal, but to exercise judgement and to see how judgment is always a social act (CM.16). The dialogues and episodes of The
Confidence-Man figure the fugitive difficulties of conceptualizing and enacting alternatives to the hegemonic cultures of whiteness and blackness being invented and violently policed in the antebellum era. 23
Chapter 1: Raving about things that could never have happened: Seizing the Master’s
Voice in Benito Cereno and “The Bell-Tower”
The tribunal inclined to the opinion that the deponent.. .raved of some things
which could never have happened (Benito Cereno 247).
In 1855, Herman Melville published two tales of repressed revolts in Putnam’s
Monthly Magazine o f American Literature, Science and Art.5 Where Benito Cereno presents a slave revolt lead by “the negro Babo” onboard a ship, “The Bell-Tower” recounts the overlooked murders of two builders working on a Titanic tower in Italy. In both texts, oppressed laborers overpower their masters in revolts which the official narrative works to silence and foreclose. Both stories are concerned with examining how laboring bodies are simultaneously exploited, rendered inhuman, and deprived a voice both in court and in the tale itself. By looking at the articles which surrounded Benito
Cereno and “The Bell-Tower ” in Putnam's Monthly we can see more clearly how
Melville’s narratives operated within racist and racializing discourses of his era. Precisely because “a slave uprising signals not only liberation but also radical transformation of the
5 “The Bell-Tower” appeared in the August 1855 edition while Benito Cereno followed quickly in three anonymous installments in October, November, and December 1855. Taken together, both stories present a transatlantic study of the hierarchical relations of master and slave, gentleman and worker seen on either side of the Atlantic. Other than Carolyn Karcher, in Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America, I have found no other critics who have included Benito Cereno and The Bell-Tower in the corpus of Melville’s “diptychs” and yet these stories mirror the transatlantic study of contrasting issues of labor and poverty present in the other dipytchs, such as “The Paradise of Bachelors” and “The Tartarus of Maids.'\Karcher 128-146 ) 24
foundations for the reproduction of life itself,” the revolts Melville inserts into Putnam’s appear as mysterious and unknowable within the discourse of the narratives
(Mbembe:37). When laborers and slaves do speak, they must do so indirectly, in code, or through ventriloquism, having a sanctioned white male body speak in their subaltern voice. When their insurgency is revealed, the justice system forecloses and denies their voices and punishes them for their ventriloquist revolutions. The punishment operates through criminalizing and erasing the humanity of the insurgents.6
In these texts, Melville theorizes the space and identity of modernity as a “stalled- dialectic” in which the laborer is narrated into a foreclosed existence, removed from territory, marked as nameless, inhuman, black, or female, in order to be closed out of any kind of productive citizenship (Bhabha 26).7 The main insurgents -Babo and Haman/ the workers — never speak in their own, authentic voices in the text precisely because their humanity has been denied in advance. Thus, in crafting Babo’s theater and Haman’s revolt, Melville encoded a subaltern insurgent voice and practice for dehumanized
6 As Achille Mbembe describes it in Critique of Black Reason the creation of racialized subjects began by instituting and enacting their “civic destitution” and “legal incapacity.. .and therefore their exclusion from the privileges and rights guaranteed to the other inhabitants of the colonies.” Their legal incapacity became a property of their bodies and skins and it rendered them “no longer human like all others. ” Mbembe goes on to show how “the process continued with their descendants, developing increasingly severe “series of slave codes” in response to the uprisings and revolts from those who resisted their enslavement (19). Legal violence legislated nonpersonhood onto the bodies of black-skinned peoples. 7 The gender dynamics present in laboring and mastering bodies are directly theorized by Melville in “The Paradise of Bachelors” and “The Tartarus of Maids.” Likewise, the bodies and beings of the black women aboard the San Dominick are seen as animals- fawns, etc. But in this thesis I focus on the racial dynamics rather than on gendered ones. 25
laboring characters who speak through the voices of their former masters who have become their puppets. The only way out of this stalled-dialectic will lie in how the reader receives the erased insurgency despite the false constructions of the narration. In both
“The Bell-Tower” and Benito Cereno, by writing the narrative in the voice of a compromised narrator, Melville creates an indirect, ventriloquized discourse, that operates via a mystery, forcing the readers to decode what is left out of the story in order to discern and make sense of the legalistic and fictitious parts of the narratives and the legalistic and fictitious aspects of race as a construct.
In both stories, Melville’s method demonstrates a radical rhetorical strategy, one that works on the unconscious of the reader via a “rhetoric of refusal” that, as Wendy
Walters argues in At Home in Diaspora, is a “strategy that diasporic narratives employ to remain oppositional and it is a strategy that implicates the reader as well” (xxv). To sound how Melville worked on and conceptualized a reader’s reception, we need to look at and listen for what he has left out, “without assuming that we can fill it in, master, or know it”
(Walters xxv). By leaving readers to decode the mysteries left out of Delano’s narrative, the legal deposition he cites at the end, and the entire fiction of “The Bell-Tower,”
Melville operates an oppositional interpretation and pedagogy, both revealing the ideology that blinds narrators and magistrates and pointing to how readers might deconstruct those narratives through the process of first seeing the operations of race and racism and then deconstructing them. 26
Mimicry and Subversion in Melville: Deconstructing Binaries
In the construction and serialization of Benito Cereno, in a series of episodes which slowly build a narrative for Amasa Delano and, which, then suddenly remove the shackles from his eyes, Melville creates a frame that allows him to represent and, thus, investigate how narrative performances can operate like “potions,” “seeds,’’“weeds,” or even bombs (“powder”) over time.8 James Van Wyck ties the structure of this serial operation directly into questions of how racism operates on mindsets and interpersonal relationships arguing that Melville constructed a situation that could mount an
“insurrection” on readers’ mindsets (425). Indeed, the power and trouble of both texts lie predominantly in the fact that they can be read as a mystery where both narrator and reader are put in the position of being detectives who have the potential to either remain dupes of racist misreadings or restart the dialectic by receiving the insurgency and deconstructing their own position within the received conceptualizing framework - both the organism and organization — which is racism.
As Delano brings his knowledge of ships and their order to bear on what he sees on board the San Dominick, he reflects on what is normal and normative in ship culture and government. Troubled by what he sees on board, he does not know how to interpret
81 take this language of “potions,” seeds, weeds and bombs from Melville’s The Confidence-Man. As he intervenes in ideology and identity, Melville’s methodology and understanding is a serial one. He will work via gaps and doubts to insert new possibilities. 27
it. He instinctively blames the white captain because he can only understand order as a phenomenon of white leaders. Vacillating between seeing the strange actions of the
Spaniard as willful manipulation, “proceeded from design,” or as involuntary “mental disorder,” Delano represents Melville’s portrait of how “the work of racism” operates, seemingly constitutionally, to replace a real human face with “a ghost of a face” (BC 126-
7, Mbembe 32). Melville takes pains to present the grid of expectations Delano carries in relationship to both white and black people. In presenting Delano’s “tranquilizing” thoughts (160), alongside the “apprehensive twitch in the calves of his legs” and his “late fidgety panic” (140), Melville develops a shadowy realm which reflects Achille
Mbembe’s analysis of how racism works to substitute
what is with something else, with another reality... When the racist sees a Black
person, he does not see that the Black person is not there, does not exist, and is
just a sign of a pathological fixation on the absence of a relationship. We must
therefore consider race as being both beside and beyond being. It is an operation
of the imagination, the site of an encounter with the shadows and hidden zones of
the unconscious. (32)
The real characters of Babo and Benito Cereno-- as opposed to each man’s inherited nickname — are only indicated by each man’s actions and words as seen and interpreted through Delano. Both Babo and Benito Cereno represent only “ a sign” and an “operation of the imagination” and “an encounter with the shadows and hidden zones” of Delano’s
(and perhaps the reader’s) unconscious. Yet, Delano is equally read and organized within 28
the structures that define and limit Babo and Benito Cereno. Both Babo, as revolutionary, and Melville, as author, appear as revolutionary play-wrights able to read the white unconscious and play upon its assumptions, blind spots, and weaknesses.
Melville’s works present the doubleness within all symbolism, both foregrounding the binary nature of all thought and deliberately evoking a nonbinary, cosmopolitan and cynical perspective, like that evoked by the doubled-figures of
Diogenes and Black Guinea in The Confidence-Man. In Benito Cereno, the figure of
Aranda’s skeleton, used by Babo as a symbol with which to spread horror and fear among the white sailors, also figures as a symbol which cloaked, and then uncloaked, points to the mechanisms of power and fear undergirding all unequal social orders and exploitations:
With creaking masts, she came heavily round to the wind; the prow slowly
swinging into view of the boats, its skeleton gleaming in the horizontal moonlight,
and casting a gigantic ribbed shadow upon the water. One extended arm of the
ghost seemed beckoning the whites to avenge it. (BC 244)
The symbolism of Aranda’s skeleton on board the San Dominick haunts the story from the moment of Delano’s first sighting of the vessel. And, yet, both the readers and the narrator — upon whom they depend for all insight— do not see or understand the skeleton until its story gets told at third hand, through the vehicle of the Deposition given by
Benito Cereno. Throughout the initial “fictitious” episodes of Benito Cereno, the skeleton 29
remains cloaked and hidden on the bowsprit, in plain view to those in the know. (BC 251)
The skeleton is productive in the sense that it is a symbol powerful enough to terrorize the white sailors into submissively playing the roles they have been given by their former-slaves and current captors. But once the tables are turned, and the white sailors rise up, the skeleton appears as a symbol which incites rather than suppresses rebellion, seemingly - in the words of the narrator —“beckoning the whites to avenge it” (244).
Thus, cloaked and uncloaked, Aranda’s skeleton operates as a productive haunting but in diametrically opposing ways depending on who is wielding physical and thus narrative power. Finally, within the lapses of the deposition, the skeleton appears as the sign of trauma, the sign which reveals the horrors of slavery in which Babo’s, the slaves’, and
Benito Cereno’s ordeals demonstrate that all power builds itself upon the flesh of real people.
Benito Cereno’’s structure presents the scenes onboard the San Dominick through
Delano’s confusions, where he actively misreads what is happening on board.
Everything changes when Delano sees the blacks “as they are” in revolt. The narrative then quickly moves to record excerpts of the court depositions which are presented as counter-narratives to the “fictions” of the early narrative. The text presents some guidelines for readers to “get to the truth” - however doubt remains regarding how to understand Benito Cereno’s testimony (257). For “both learned and natural reasons,” the
“disclosures” in the deposition were held “dubious,” “The tribunal inclined to the opinion that the deponent.. .raved of some things which could never have happened.” But when 30
the stories of surviving sailors seconded Cereno’s testimony, the tribunal had to accept
“statements which, had they lacked confirmation, it would have deemed it but duty to reject” (BC 247-8). Thus, in the language of the narrative, the depositions appear as counter narratives to the “fictitious” tales recounted under Babo’s command but they do not appear as believable in their own right.9 However, taking the blindness of Delano’s account alongside the Deposition, it is clear that both the fictive and legalistic narratives reduce Babo’s real performance to silence. In a world of white hegemony and white supremacy, to tell tales of freed slaves who operated mastery over whites is to “rave of
...things that could never have happened.” It seems apparent that this text itself - like
Spivak’s “object of investigation” - operates within a racist discourse that represents a
“learned and natural” reason which sees whites as superior to blacks. This learned and natural reason represents the limits of what hegemony can allow itself to witness. Thus, in his inclusion of the depositions as just another faulty narrative, Melville offers his own version of a ventriloquist Critique o f Black Reason with the aim of showing a series of tableaus that enact how racism works to distort mindsets and erase the truth.
When Spivak asks about the “receiver” (and also the potential blocker) of a radical message, she points to the relation underlying all insurgency. Spivak reminds us
9 Melville inserts bracketed italics to explain how the text of the deposition proceeds after the fictitious story: [And so the deposition goes on, circumstantially recounting the fictitious story dictated to the deponent by Babo, and through the deponent imposed upon Captain Delano; and also recounting the friendly offers o f Captain Delano, with other things, but alt o f which is here omitted. After the fictitious story, etc. the deposition proceeds:] (BC 257) 31
that insurgencies are “social acts” which are “collectively intended” and that they become
“texts for knowledge” in a process, in which the role of “historian” is conjured into existence (82). Breaches exist within the production of the dominant discourse because it is produced by historians - by real human beings-- who themselves may exist as other to the discourse which authorizes them. By pointing to motivated narratives, and disciplinary trainings that are colonial and sanctioned - but which nevertheless “clamor” with alternatives, at the same time that they seek to suppress any imitation of insurgency -
- Spivak indicates how the subject of the texts of an insurgency “can only serve as a counter-possibility” (82) to the dominant narrative. Underlying tensions, suspensions and echoes nevertheless appear within any “elaboration of the insurgency” implying that an excess - an in-surgency - is in the place of becoming which can infect the historian or her readers providing a potent model for imitation.
In Benito Cereno and “The Bell-Tower,” the narrator is the only voice and lens through which the reader witnesses the revolts. The rebellious and insurgent characters which appear in Melville’s works have bodies which preclude them from speaking directly as their full and true selves. The subaltern identity of Melville’s rebels exist beyond and outside of hegemonic discourse, just as Mbembe argues that race exists “both beside and beyond being” (32). They possess an alterity that gets communicated to readers only through the filter of the white male narrator’s lens. Yet, as dehumanized as they are within the social order, these figures gain power obliquely from the texts themselves which point to an off-scene alterity and agency to the insurgent they silence. 32
The texts point to the fact that “the subaltern” as well as the “revolutionary” exist somewhere ontologically— in an, as yet, unmapped elsewhere. At the same time, through the intentional confusions of his texts, and the gap Melville constructs between the narrators’ texts for knowledge and their obvious misunderstandings, he points to how insurgency and insurgents get veiled and erased into a subaltern, and thus silenced, state.
Melville has not suppressed the clamor of his own consciousness in the elaboration of an insurgent-consciousness. Will his clamor awaken that of readers?
Seizing the Master’s Voice: Ventriloquizing Power through Benito Cereno
In Benito Cereno, Babo, who can no longer be called a slave because he has killed his master, will be murdered and displayed after his death by a legal system in and to which he never speaks. But before his death — and for the bulk of the narrative — Babo demonstrates himself as a master of both himself and others, exercising power through an inherently dangerous ventriloquism. Disguised as a servant, he turns a white-male aristocrat, Benito Cereno, into a puppet because his black body — along with all the black bodies aboard the ship they have liberated — cannot appear as master within the racially marked world of power and hierarchy in which they exist. In this way, Babo acts (in a complicated example of ventriloquism and double-speak) through the body of a white man whose mind he must first terrorize into submission. Through the drama of Babo,
Melville constructs a reversal of the structures of power and terror that slave owners operated on the bodies and minds of their slaves. Slave traders and owners terrorized the humans they enslaved into assuming a servile role — usurping their bodies and larynxes 33
with their imposed role of enslaved commodity. The mastery Babo demonstrates in seizing the master’s voice appears as a revolt that really happened. In this revolt, white captains were duped and killed by Africans, by former slaves, before the revolt could be oppressed and the insurgents publicly punished. However, Melville’s tale also reveals, through the ‘tranquil’ philosophies and patent blindness of Amasa Delano, taken alongside the text of the court depositions cited at the end of the narrative, the delusional ideological tranquilizers that a enslaving society must adopt in order not only to mask its inherent violence but to present its supremacy as an undoubted and veritable truth (BC
166).
Babo’s liberation depends on being able to have a crew of white men follow his script and improvised cues in real-time. Thus, Babo creates and directs a theater where his voice operates via a mask of whiteface and a ventriloquized white voice. Yet, Babo’s mastery, interiority, consciousness, and voice as a black man— that is his sovereignty- remain obscene (i.e. off-scene) in the sense that the text never speaks Babo’s voice except in the pantomimed performance of “Babo, the servant.” We know that Babo, the black man, the full-human being, spoke, was conscious, self-conscious and made decisions that became an insurgency. We know that he changed the direction and fate of several groups of people. But that insurgency and its ways and means remain off-scene to the narration and its narrators, told only through the lenses of a confused narrator (Delano) and then through the second-hand account of the court deposition presented by Benito Cereno. The off-scene quality of the revolt remains a significantly resonant lapsus within Melville’s 34
narrative allowing Melville to point to how narratives (and individuals) can be disabled by the dominant discourse, represented as “raving” or insane, and deemed unaccountable precisely because they are disruptive. By presenting these characters as both sane and powerful before they are dismembered, Melville, as author, enacts a ventriloquism in his texts, which both points to and subverts the gap between racial and class categories and individual power. He does so in order to subvert the undoubting science of white supremacy being elaborated at the time in so many social and literary texts.10
A Rhetoric o f Refusal: Uncovering the Death o f the Worker in “The Bell-Tower”
“The Bell-Tower” presents the doubled and uncanny story of the death of a worker rendered unimportant within the technological sublime of an engineering masterwork, and the silencing framework of the noble Magistrates who financed its production. Two laboring figures are both presented and hidden within the story: a nameless and faceless worker and a shrouded automaton. In the first, and most elided homicide of the text, the engineer, Bannadonna, kills an unnamed human worker, whose blood falls into a vat of molten metal. Later, the engineer himself is killed, seemingly by the automaton, leaving readers to wonder, has the blood of the worker somehow mystically entered the metal lic-body of the automaton, who subsequently took revenge
10 Two recent films -- Sorry to Bother You and Blackkklansman (2018) — produced by black filmmakers and performed by predominantly black actors focus on “white voice” and code-switching in ways that can be seen as operative in Melville. The mastery Babo demonstrates in seizing the master’s voice connects to the mastery of white voice in both films. Furthermore, the self-reflexive lenses of the films point, like Melville’s works, back to the viewer/reader with direct citations of primary sources from the era in ways that connect the fiction to the real. 35
on the engineer, Bannadonna? Have the workers themselves killed Bannadonna and staged the automaton as the uncanny murderer? The story gives no clues, and never delves into the roles and consciousness of the workers, showing only the shadowy tableau of Bannadonna’s death followed by its cover-up and the dramatic uncovering of the majestic tower.
The being and voice of the nameless and faceless worker killed in Belladonna’s workshop is even more resonantly absent than Babo’s obfuscated revolt and voice in
Benito Cereno reminding us of the haunting potential of the slave revolt - that which cannot be spoken. This worker - so quickly erased and overlooked within the narrative - appears uncannily revived and doubled in form of Haman, the automaton. In “The Bell-
Tower ” the only time we directly see Haman, the Automaton, it appears frozen in the act of smiting its creator:
It had limbs, and seemed clad in a scaly mail, lustrous as a dragon-beetle’s. It was
manacled, and its clubbed arms were uplifted, as if, with its manacles, once more
to smite its already smitten victim. One advanced foot of it was inserted beneath
the dead body, as if in the act of spuming it. (420)
Bannadonna, the engineer, builder, and visionary is descried lying “prostrate and bleeding” under the foot of this once “cloaked” figure (420). The once masked laborer is unmasked, seized unmoving within the scene of its murderous revolt. We see, thus, the insurrection of an inhuman, laboring body who has (again, only apparently) killed its 36
master and creator. But, we see also that its tale will not be properly or clearly told. The next words of the narrative appear in a sentence, standing alone in a separate paragraph:
“Uncertainty falls on what now followed.” The agency and rebellion of workers will remain obscured. How an automaton could have come alive to kill Bannadonna will also remain obscure. Readers, thus, experience how uncertainty circulates through both authorized narratives and fictional accounts. They must look for answers elsewhere.
Despite being the productive engine of the society in which they work, the laborers in Melville’s works are shown to have no voice or agency within the social order or, significantly, within the text that can only obliquely record their voices, bodies and revolts. In contemporary parlance, we could say that these stories point to how “the
Revolution will not be Televised”(Scott-Heron).n Both the legal depositions and the narrative fictions woven by Babo, Delano, and Benito Cereno simultaneously obscure
11 The original, spoken word version of "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" was released in 1970 on Gil Scott-Heron's debut album, Small Talk. This song mirrors much in Melville’s own reflections on revolution, official narratives, the voice of power, and commercialism. Juxtaposing the lyrics of Scott- Heron’s song, “The revolution will not be televised,” with Benito Cereno, “The Bell-Tower,” and The Confidence-Man allows us to see the specificities of our own time through the lens of reflections on the past. Where Scott-Heron writes: The revolution will not be televised The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox In 4 parts without commercial interruption The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon”. Melville’s fictions show depositions which silence the actions of revolutionaries. Where Scott-Heron writes of commercialism - “The revolution will not go better with Coke /The revolution will not fight the germs that cause bad breath.”- Melville shows confidence men promising Protean Chairs and herbal remedies that banish all sorrows and ills. Where Scott-Heron writes that “The revolution WILL put you in the driver's seat,” Melville points to the reader as the receiver of this untold insurgency, this untold revolution. For Melville, like Scott-Heron, reminds readers that the revolution will not be recorded in depositions, it will be live. 37
and reveal the insurrection. This process is even more resonantly haunting in “The Bell-
Tower.” The work of both stories lies in revealing erasure and oppression. Both stories present a compromised voice designed to work on the sensibility of readers who must become detectives in order to piece together the silenced souls and elided bodies in the narrative.
While both Benito Cereno and “The Bell-Tower ” perform the systematic attribution of nonpersonhood onto laboring and black-skinned bodies, they do so indirectly. Melville imbues these stories with a telling air of mystery, constructing an ambiguity of address which leads to confusion. Who is speaking and through whom?
What is really happening? These questions as well as the blurring of distinctions between white and black, human and nonhuman bodies lead to deeper questions of what blackness and whiteness, human and nonhuman, signify and how narratives can both reproduce and potentially disrupt ideological structures and identity. In order to make sense of what is happening, readers must learn to doubt and analyze the limits of the narrator’s lens which are tied to received ideas of social status and worth. In this way, Melville’s readers are taught to question the constitutive roles of language and narrative in determining and fixing social values at the same time that they are cast in the role of analysts investigating the text - and racism itself-- for what it misses and for what is missing.
Black Bodies and Civil Discourse in Putnam’s: Melville’s Interventions in Race Thinking
By the 1850’s, Putnam’s had earned itself a reputation as a press with abolitionist leanings. Within the context of Putnam's abolitionism, Melville’s narratives appear as 38
critically resistant of slavery and white supremacy in ways that interrogate the myths and methods of white supremacy that remain encoded in so-called abolitionist texts. Other texts in the same publication as Benito Cereno reveal and highlight the omnipresence of slavery as an issue front and center in everyone’s mind. An article entitled “The Kansas
Question” appeared in the same volume as the first installment of Benito Cereno}2 It argued that slavery was on the minds of everyone, “men of tempered and conservative disposition” — and not only “excitable” and “ardent” extremists — “vibrated” with questions of slavery. “The Kansas Question” is presented in a language of reason and decorum, fitting in unequivocally with the terms of white civility being invented at the time. And, yet, via Delano’s mindset and the erasures present in “The Bell-Tower,”
Melville reveals that the seemingly enlightened North — and, thus, viewpoints such as those expressed in Putnam’s — were as tied to the marginalization of black bodies (and minds) as the openly racist views of those in the slave-holding South.13 In Benito Cereno, courtesy and unpleasantness appear as the most salient preoccupations (and that which must be avoided) for Delano much in the way that discourses of civility permeate
Putnam's. When Morrison describes the foreclosure of knowledge — and the “liberal,”
“graceful” and “generous” gesture and “well-bred instinct” which “argues against noticing ” blackness, black agency, and violence/ controversy, she could be read as
12 Putnam’s Monthly Volume 6, Issue: 34, October 1855. 13 Van Wyck writes: “Melville’s parable of race relations... reveals what almost no white Northerner understood in the 1850s, that even the most benevolent, well-intentioned Northerner was participating in a sociopolitical arrangement in which human relations were predicated on the marginalization of black bodies” (447). 39
offering a direct analysis of the mind-set present in Putnam's as well as that which
Melville portrays via Delano’s “indulgent” interpretations and misinterpretations regarding Benito Cereno’s “reserve,” and “disorderly conduct” on board the San
Dominick (BC 127).
Via the lens provided by Putnam’s, the society of the time appears polemically engaged with the question of defining humanity and understanding race. In a multitude of articles, questions of an universal humanity appear alongside of diacritics of difference descried along lines of racial difference. Articles in the same issues of Putnam’s where
Melville published “The Bell-Tower” and Benito Cereno demonstrate a discourse which raises the question of universal and undifferentiated humanity- “Is Man One or Many?” and “Are all Men descended from Adam?”14— alongside of articles which focus on the specificity of black individuals and black historiography. For example, “Negro
Minstrelsy” is traced in its Ancient and Modem frameworks in one article. Alongside
Putnam’s articles sounding a “universal humanity” on the one hand, and a definitive racializing discourse on the other, the revolutionaries in Melville’s Benito Cereno and
“The Bell-Tower” operate symbolically in ways that trouble the civility, decorum, and
14 Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, Vol. 5 1855. 40
the move toward universality present in the essays “Is Man One or Many?” and “Are all
Men descended from Adam?” at the same time that they reveal the problematic racism present in seemingly celebratory and romanticizing essays on blackness. In The
Intimacies o f Four Continents, Lisa Lowe describes this simultaneously universalizing and racializing process as the foundational act of the liberal enlightenment. Like Lowe,
Melville presents a world where the “universal promise of rights, emancipation, wage labor and free trade” is shown as deeply tied to (and founded upon) “global divisions and asymmetries” in which “liberties are reserved for some and wholly denied others” ( 3).
The polemical, anonymous, article entitled “About Niggers,” appeared in the same issue of Benito Cereno. Like Benito Cereno it addresses a presumed white and racist audience, while attempting to allow for a progressive voice. Furthermore, like most of the episodes of Melville’s later work, The Confidence-Man, which he was likely composing at the same time as he was publishing in Putnam’s, the article is voiced as a dialogue which allows the writer to dissect and sometimes merge opposing points of view rhetorically. The article introduces readers to a discourse designed to restore the dignity to black men by reframing the derogatory terms which whites use in speaking of them.
Addressed to a “Mrs. Grundy” — a popular figure representing conventional mindsets -- the anonymous writer of “About Niggers” quickly makes it clear that his/her aim is to criticize racism which gets into “Putnam...oftener than some folks think [it] ought to”
(vol 5, 1855 608). By naming the journal in which it appears, and setting up a dialectic between convention and rebellion, this piece deliberately breaks the separation between 41
writer and reader, and seemingly dares to speak the revolutionary potential of black people. The voice of the article makes it clear that it wants to elevate the black man in the
American imaginary, culminating finally in the lines: “The nigger is no joke, and no baboon: he is simply a black-man, and I say: Give him fair play and let us see what he will come to” (612). Endeavoring to elevate the black man out of the realm of “joke” and of Darwinian hinterland (“baboon”) the article speaks directly to the reader and exhorts him/her to give the black man “fair play.” Yet, the irony of this text remains that the black man has not been entirely brought into Putnam’s. He is not published as an author in Putnam’s and is only brought in as an imaginary representative figure. The article exhorts readers to “give [the black man] a chance...maybe he will amount to something.”
With the line, “let us see what he will come to,” it points more to a presumed racial community between reader and writer, an “us” that is framed unequivocally as white, than it does to any single black person.
The tropes and references of the article move from the “ugly” remarks of planters, and the “ugly” n-word of the title to tropes of civility and celebration noting the “barbaric splendor which hangs about the true nigger” and musing on black women much in the way Delano as depicted by Melville wondered about the “ugly remark of a Barbadoes planter” and admired black women in terms both animalistic and naturalistic (BC 212).
With depictions of the revolutionary power of Toussaint Louverture and with lines where the author indicates he has been to religious festivals with blacks and admits to “wishing he could be” black because of their “large capacities for enjoying the present, however 42
absurd,” we see yet another commonplace of white American racism in the “Love and
Theft” variety, which Eric Lott showed to be central to the invention of whiteness (vol 5,
1855 611). In Lott’s formula, an emergent class consciousness emerging in the long nineteenth century gets reframed in terms of racial tensions. This racism presents a romance which romanticizes and belittles black individuals at the same time that it seeks to civilize white audiences beyond the “ugly” remarks and terminology held in the n- word.
In its efforts to humanize black people, the Putnam’s article remains within the strict bounds of a silencing civil decorum that Melville, Lott, Van Wyck, Morrison,
Banerjee, and Lowe show to be part and parcel of the oppression and exclusion of black minds and bodies from full liberal humanism. Specifically, following a structure established by Lott in Love and Theft, Banerjee in Ethnic Ventriloquism, and Lowe in The
Intimacies o f Four Continents, we can see that a white community of Putnam's readers is built upon ventriloquizing ethnic others in a process where supposedly civilized and civilizing white actors allow black people to come into being. The violence of white actors gets erased at the same time that romantic and humoristic lenses present black subjects as non-threatening. As Neil Smith and Don Mitchell show in Revolting New
York: How 400 Years o f Riot, Rebellion, Uprising and Revolution Shaped a City when class-based riots began in New York in the 1830s-1840s, they quickly turned in to riots where whites began attacking blacks creating a reality where an emergent consciousness of being white was literally created “over the bodies of black people” (Lott:67). The 43
violent attacks by whites on black bodies in response to alienating market forces contrasted to the fact that when black people revolted, they attacked property not white people. Thus, Melville’s attention to the white imaginary as something to reveal and decode points to the heart of the real violence present in Antebellum America. Violence was typically exercised by whites in racist acts not by blacks. To end violence, one would need to understand the mechanisms behind the violence enacted by whites in the name of race.
The form and content of Melville’s publications in periodicals show that
Melville’s works need to be read outside of a simplistic view which sees a text as “either speak[ing] for a dominant ideology or subverting] it by speaking for and from the margins.” Instead, we can “see how these texts ...mimic the dominant rhetoric of the day while speaking their true subversive logic at the margins or in meaningful interstices”
(Gardner:745). This mimicry is a form of ventriloquism which performs the underlying relationship between master and slave, of civilizing violence, at the same time that it disrupts the hegemonic logic of the relationship between civilized decorum and violence.
In this process, an epistemology of theft places the shame of loss on the working and productive subject rather than on the parasitical masters who consume the fruits of the subject’s labor. Black bodies appear as no more than imaginary structures upon which and out of which whiteness is built. Melville’s works subvert the way black bodies appear and thus the way white imaginaries behave. 44
The Theater o f White Imaginaries: Constructing Black Liberation
A telling scene, cleverly staged by Babo-the playwright, shows how the elements of blackening and criminalization, as well as carefully staged suspicion, can be used by insurgents to disguise (i.e. cover up and protect) their revolution. When Delano’s attempts to find a white sailor to speak to in order to clear up “certain mysteries,” he is at a loss about what to think and whom to trust. Moving through “the white faces, here and there sparsely mixed in with the blacks, like stray white pawns venturously involved in the ranks of the chess-men opposed,” he senses but “insensibly” ignores, that the whites are overpowered and exist as no more than “stray pawns” in opposition to the highly ranked members of the blacks. Benito Cereno — the white “captain” — has (under Babo’s orders) indicated that Amasa Delano should not trust the white crew (BC 170). The “ill opinion” shared by Benito Cereno and the mean employment of the sailors make the darting glances and downtumed eyes of the terrified (and amply supervised) sailor- pawns look like signs of guilt (171). As Delano notes a contrast between the “fine face” and “dark hands” and “mean employment” of a sailor, Melville shows how potential
(and thus actual) guilt gets ascribed to physiognomy. Doubt seconded by signs of menial status or employment are enough to ascertain guilt: “Whether his haggardness had aught to do with criminality, could not be determined” (171). Regardless of the indeterminate nature of his “guilt,” Delano decides not to trust the man and moves on. The sailor’s character has effectively been blackened and criminalized by the doubt that Benito
Cereno, ventriloquizing Babo’s text, has sown. Babo knows intimately how prejudice 45
works to blacken and criminalize workers at the same time that it uplifts and whitens the role of master. Babo therefore pantomimes and performs blackening rituals to criminalize white sailors and both elevate and discredit Benito Cereno. Babo uses his knowledge to his - and to the revolution’s - advantage, and to the disadvantage of the white men who cannot see that their understanding is not based on reality, but rather solely on the desire and the violence of their order and identity.
Melville creates several more tableaux which reveal Delano’s constitutive ignorance founded upon his white privilege. The luncheon that Delano and Cereno share creates a tableau for the readers in which dismissive racist discourse contrasts to what is really going on. Delano, comfortable in his white skin and status as captain, feels indulgent and celebratory of the beauty and decorum of the blacks and mulattos who serve them. Delano observes “with interest” the hybrid racial bodies around him, projecting moral significance on the shapes and forms he sees: “Captain Delano observed with interest that while the complexion of the mulatto was hybrid, his physiognomy was
European—classically so.” He whispers to Don Benito describing how happy he is to see the good behavior and classical features of the mulatto because “the sight refutes an ugly remark once made to [him] by a Barbadoes planter” (212). For Delano “ugly” remarks point to problems among the races, where all he wants to see is harmony. Readers - like
Delano - may not have yet guessed the truth, which Cereno knows, which is that this apparent servitude is only a pantomime - a masque designed to dupe Delano. Knowing that Babo and his crew are truly revolutionaries who control the whites on board, Cereno 46
finds himself in the difficult situation of both playing up Delano’s harmonic illusion while remaining unoffensive to the blacks in the room and furthering their pantomime of servitude. Cereno manages to skirt dangers in the face of Delano’s offensive remarks by muttering “Doubtless, doubtless, Senor,” while glancing at Babo and offering praise of the blacks before falling into a stony silence that Delano finds uncivil and troubling. The phrase “Doubtless, doubtless” — repeated several times in the text — rings in strong contrast to Delano’s constant attempts to ignore the doubts which his unconscious senses.
By placing readers in the same confusing predicament as Delano - how to understand the strange actions of Cereno ? - Melville points to how white supremacy prefers to be voiced in a cavalier and genteel tone, while refraining from any doubts about its rightness and stability. He raises the crucial problematic for a slave-holding, capitalist society -- not only equality — but the nature of giving and receiving, connection and vulnerability, enslavement and freedom, blackness and whiteness. Any doubt threatens this order and must be suppressed. The fact that Melville serially sows doubt - and suggestive dubiety- throughout his texts points to the degree that he sees slavery as being based on an undoubting science. Thus, doubt itself becomes a powerfully disruptive force, undermining the epistemological and ontological systems which undergird white supremacy and thus slavery. Those readers who become conscious of the ineptness of Delano’s racist theories and vision may engage in a quest to replace
Delano’s interpretation with another. What will be the effect of the doubt that they have learned in response to Delano? In tracing the historical underpinnings of the improvised 47
racial terms and sciences of humanity which play out in the texts which surround Benito
Cereno and “The Bell-Tower ” in Putnam’s, we can see what Lisa Lowe describes as the
“intimacies” of global capitalism as it “improvised” “distinct yet connected racial logics” built upon myths of civilization and human freedom (8). How blackness appears in
Benito Cereno and “The Bell-Tower” both reproduces and contests the romantic and universalizing tropes present in Putnam’s while pointing to an as yet unarticulated possibility, an uneliminable surplus not knowable in the narratives (both ethnographic and essayistic, fictitious and scientific) presented therein.
Though Delano begins to suspect collusion between whites and blacks, thinking that Benito Cereno could be plotting his murder — “could then Don Benito be any way in complicity with the blacks?”— the idea of complicity between whites and blacks occurs to him as a possibility that he quickly banishes: “who ever heard of a white so far a renegade as to apostatize from his very species almost, by leaguing in against it with negroes?” (180) To align one’s self across racial lines would be to become “a renegade,” to “apostatize from his very species almost.” In the process of trying to makes sense of what he witnesses on board the San Dominick, Delano betrays his racist beliefs: “The whites...by nature, were the shrewder race” and the blacks “were too stupid” (BC: 180).
Yet, at the very moment in which he regurgitates these racist notions, Delano appears surrounded by intelligent former-slaves who have over-powered and killed their former masters. These free black people are controlling the narrative and limiting what Delano is able to see and understand. The reader will soon discover, if she hasn’t already guessed it, 48
that Delano’s “shrewdness” is patently wrong in this case and that his own life is at risk.
Both Delano and Cereno — “shrewd whites” as he imagines them to be — are actually the dupe of former slaves who he believed “too stupid” to execute and man the revolt which they have already achieved. Instead of the blacks being “too stupid,” the readers thus see
Delano as “too stupid” or perhaps simply too blinded by his own knowledge to see what is truly happening on board the San Dominick while Babo appears as clever and masterful enough to manipulate Delano.
From the hooded deck of the San Dominick, to its stem-piece, masks and blinders percolate the text of Benito Cereno. These blinders can be seen as pointing to the other blinders (and foreclosures) present in the pages of Putnam’s surrounding both “The
Bell-Tower” and Benito Cereno. When the masks are tom off, Captain Delano is able to see what the Magistrates in “The Bell-Tower,” and what the Depositions and Trials in
Lima, quickly foreclose, and that is the communal will to freedom of enslaved peoples and exploited, dehumanized workers but even then, with masks tom off, the description points to the revolt as a “piratical revolt” as if the discourse still cannot name that ultimate haunting, a revolution of the slaves. Instead, the blacks are represented as pirates, who would be, in this case, stealing their own bodies and freedom from the clutches of the slave-holders. When the “scales [are] dropped from his eyes,” Delano sees what would make for a terrifying scene of battle. He had seen the blacks “not as they were” for the first two installments of the tale (238). How do readers see Delano, his vision, and the bodies he described? Will the surprise of Delano’s revelation also be the 49
readers’? The reflexive nature of Melville’s whiteface ventriloquism appears precisely in this moment when his texts point back to the reader to decode the insurgency. Babo operates via white face and ventriloquism, and this ventriloquism points back to the reader who must decode Melville’s process in order to glean anything from the mystery.
But, Melville (like Babo) encodes this whiteface obliquely, through and over the symbolism of blackness, again making clear this process that theorists from Lott to
Banerjee and Morrison have rendered clear which is that whiteness constructs itself through blackness but hides that construction.
In what lens would freed-slaves be seen as pirates? In one willfully blind to
“connection and convergence.” (Lowe: 5) This compromised voice, blind to
“connection and convergence,” is also the voice of the Northerners in Putnam ’s and the larger political and judicial system in which they operated. Melville creates a claustrophobic world which can only see through the lens of its limited white narrators and their depositions. It is precisely at this place of the relationship between the reader’s reception of and reaction to Babo, Amasa Delano, Benito Cereno, and the text of the
Deposition (the otherwise absent utterances and characters of the court of law) that the true trouble begins. It is here that readers enter a realm of mystification which Melville points to as a limit to uncover. Unless they take refuge in the consciousness of Delano, readers cannot fail but be troubled by how to read the ambiguities and juxtapositions of
Melville’s endings. In addressing Melville’s “contact with his readers,” Geoffrey Sanborn argues that Melville’s work masterfully “refuses to present us with anything even 50
temporarily substantial beyond the horizon of the nai've white consciousness.” Following this point, I would argue that the only way out is not through “the vacant eyes of the master and the slave” (Sanborn xv-xvi) but rather through a consciousness that sees how these terms “master” and “slave” are actually only “nicknames” rather than full designations of personhood (Mbembe 32).
Teresa Goddu’s article, “Vampire Gothic,” links gothic novels and the context of slavery in ways that point to how gothic texts “ (re)configure national narratives of race”
(137). Goddu traces African-American writers “as the producers of terror instead of its text,” showing how they used “the gothic to haunt back, reworking the gothic’s conventions to intervene in discourses that would demonize them” (138). Goddu’s language of “haunting back” against demonizing discourses points to methodologies that
Melville develops to illuminate and explore the “monstrous relations” that civil discourses aim to erase and hide. Goddu argues that “once the gothic is recognized as a discourse deployed in many forms, from founding documents and antislavery tracts to science writing and supernatural stories, its tropes are seen to permeate cultural constructions of nation and race” (136). Melville likewise places the discourses of confused and lying narrators on the same level as court depositions, and would-be scientific ethnologies, showing how these supposedly scientific and legalistic documents are as savage as any ghost story. 51
Within the publications in Putnam's, Melville’s texts points to a question which is the dominating fear of a slave-holding, imperial society: When blackness speaks what will it say? And, fundamentally, what is whiteness without blackness? With Aranda’s skeleton, Melville’s text obliquely conflates what Settler Colonial Christian imaginaries coded as the most barbaric act possible - cannibalism - with the commonly overlooked barbarism of commodifying and enslaving black people. Thus, the symbol of Aranda’s skeleton simultaneously represents disclosure and obscurity. It articulates ambivalently - literally facing in two ways - depending on one’s position within racial hierarchies of labor and identity. By drawing attention to the multifaceted and refracted nature of
Aranda’s skeleton, Melville opens up the narrative codes through which power works within human social orders to show that all symbols and narratives, and thus power itself is ambivalent and open to seizure. This silence must be broken into in order to speak the voice of true insurgency but this silence also represents a weakness that insurgents can manipulate with their own ventriloquist seizures of otherwise dominant bodies. In
“Volcanoes and Meteors: Douglass, Melville, and the Poetics of Insurrection,” Gleason traces how “antislavery poets experimented with ventriloquism to mock the hypocrisy and racism of slave holders or their supporters” (114). Performance and ventriloquism remain, thus, pointers towards insurrection — as much as they are tools of insurrection itself. And, yet, the troubled question remains, “who is the receiver of an insurrection?”
(Spivak:58). Melville points the question (and the problem) back to us, the receivers of the message, as the only locale of reception and agency. There is no agency in the text, 52
after all. It is simply a recording of imagined agencies - and an unveiling of convergence and correspondence which may, perhaps, trigger our sense of connection and our liberation as free agents within and against discourses of oppression and separation. 53
Chapter 2\ The Confidence-Man’s Masquerades: Uninvented Games, Common
Justice, and the Metaphysics of Producing Whiteness and Blackness
"Oh, this, all along, is not you, Charlie, but some ventriloquist who usurps your larynx.” (CM 323)
“Are there none here who feel in need of help, and who, in accepting such help, would feel that they, in their time, have given or done more than may ever be given or done to them? Man or woman, is there none such here?” (CM 140)
“Then, you shall hear my story. Many a month I have longed to get hold of the Happy Man, drill him, drop the powder, and leave him to explode at his leisure." (CM 145)
In The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, the world Herman Melville develops on board the ever-flowing Mississippi steamer, Fidele, allows him to investigate, through the performances of seemingly endlessly protean actor(s), how writers -- and other masters of discourse and performance - respond to and manipulate the registers of their own bodies as racialized entities to play upon the experience, knowledge and choices of their interlocutors. In this complex and self-reflexive work, Melville creates an episodic and serially interlocking frame that allows him to investigate how race and racism operate as core elements in the construction of antebellum American modernity. Melville creates a serially interlocking frame that allows him to represent and, thus, investigate how narrative performances can operate like “potions,” “seeds,” “weeds,” or even bombs
(“powder”) over time, and in stages, to manipulate the thoughts, judgments and actions of 54
individuals and crowds. The confidenee-man, the character, and The Confidence-Man, the text, operate through staged interruptions which encourage one to witness a gap between what one sees and what one hears, and one’s judgment of it. The work operates precisely through the artifice of masquerades, encouraging those of us on the outside, looking in, to witness a gap between an individual’s body and skin and what that skin and body might signify depending on one’s position and the story one tells. By putting race front and center into the moral and metaphysical questions which bookend the text concerning the relationship between self and other, Melville goes to the heart of the identifications and contradictions - the ambivalence - around identity and morality in modernity. Likewise, the theme of the bewitching power of tales, and the deep intimacies present in conversations, and in the seductive (and thus transformative) potential of dialogues figures throughout The Confidence-Man and Benito Cereno. The confidence-man and Babo do not operate only from first impressions, but from long- winded riddles, and multiple interactions, that confuse and charm in relation to those first impressions.
The Confidence-Man's masquerades raise the crucial problematic for a capitalist economy — the nature of giving and receiving, connection and vulnerability, enslavement and freedom. Indeed, perhaps the most difficult questions of the text — the one which incites silence, sobs, and much hesitation on the part of the crowd - comes in the chapter entitled “The Inquest into the True Character of the Herb Doctor”: “Are there none here who feel in need of help?” (140). Why the trouble of admitting one needs help? Why is 55
horror and disgust so often elicited by those who ask for help? For those who become conscious of their own puzzlement and skepticism after one of these interruptions, the question becomes: why? Why would the confidence-man go through so much trouble just for a few coins? Why would an “inquest” into the true character of a person be necessary? The answer riddled throughout the text will not be a simple Either/Or, or a simple Good or Evil, but rather one which seeks to engage in an alternative to Either/Or/
Good/Evil. In “Metaphysics, Money & the Messiah: A Conversation about Melville's The
Confidence-Man,” Cornel West argues: “Part of the genius of Melville is that he understood William James’ insight: the core of the religious and existential problem for human beings is the call for help” (105). Flowever where West and Burnett grapple with how “Melville pushes a Christian... up against the wall,” I see The Confidence-Man - and Melville himself— as holding a goal which is, in fact, generous and generative as can be seen by his approach to the Soldier of Fortune (Burnett, West:l 14). Melville through the moral games of The Confidence-Man sets seedling bombs within the hypocrisy of passengers (and reader) to reveal the possibility of yet uninvented games and the possibility of “salutary” forms of common justice.
The confidence-man appears as a singular being (an ‘original’) to the characters onboard the Fidele. To nearly the entire society of the antebellum south, he appears as either a dangerous or liberatory, literally life-saving, singularity. Drawing on the vision of
Jean-Luc Nancy in The Inoperative Community, we can see how the confidence-man 56
makes “contact” - how he appears as a “contagion” (Nancy 61).'5 Likewise, passengers on board the Fidele have no choice but to be in common while in passage onboard even when that common defines them (like Black Guinea or the deaf-mute or The Confidence-
Man himself) as a potential contagion to be either pitied, brutalized, or contained. In the juxtaposition of these opposing - and related—singularities, Melville interrupts central myths of U.S. identity, “psychologic theology,” and history. The masquerade that
Melville creates performs the drama by which blackness is created as a commodity so that whiteness can appear as over and beyond commodification. In both cases, the masquerade appears as a question open to discussion and doubt, seen from the outside, rather than a masque constructed and seen from within. Passengers on board the Fidele ask themselves who Guinea is just as later they ask who other characters are and what their goals are. But the actors and deception are never entirely unveiled. Because of the black body he seems to inhabit the fact that Guinea must be questioned appears unambiguous to the other passengers. Blackness figures as already, a priori, a problem
15 Nancy’s work focuses on the being in common present in a court of law but also around any act of narration. The singular entities onboard the Fidele likewise compear, specifically viz a viz the offering of the confidence-man via his troubling performances: Singular beings compear: their compearance constitutes their being, puts them in communication with one another. But the interruption of community, the interruption of the totality that would fulfill it, is the very law of compearance. The singular being appears to other singular beings; it is communicated to them in the singular. It is a contact, it is a contagion: a touching, the transmission of a trembling at the edge of being, the communication of a passion that makes us fellows, or the communication of the passion to be fellows, to be in common. (Nancy, 61) 57
and a question. Other characters — disguised within white bodies - do not necessarily elicit such troubling doubt at first, their behavior and words have to trigger doubt.
Second-Hand Tales: Ventriloquism, Repetition, and Ideology
I wish I could do so in my own words, but unhappily the original story-teller here
has so tyrannized over me, that it is quite impossible for me to repeat his incidents
without sliding into his style. I forewarn you of this, that you may not think me so
maudlin as, in some parts, the story would seem to make its narrator. It is too bad
that any intellect, especially in so small a matter, should have such power to
impose itself upon another, against its best exerted will, too. (CM 323-4)
Furthering the diagnosis of power in relationship to whiteness/blackness, in The
Confidence-Man Melville creates tales within tales which allow him to portray how racist beliefs and violent exclusions develop and get passed down. In the story of China Aster and the “Metaphysics of Indian Hating,” Melville presents a “word for word” ventriloquism where ones’ ideas become contaminated by another’s story. Where the narrator of the tale of of China Aster warns his interlocutors that the original story-teller has “tyrannized” over him and “imposed” itself on his intellect against his “best exerted will,” the “Metaphysics of Indian Hating” is framed in the chapter which precedes it as a narrative which will be uttered “almost word for word” in the voice of another:
In every company being called upon to give this history, which none could better
do, the judge at last fell into a style so methodic, you would have thought he
spoke less to mere auditors than to an invisible amanuensis; seemed talking for 58
the press; very impressive way with him indeed. And I, having an equally
impressible memory, think that, upon a pinch, I can render you the judge upon the
colonel almost word for word. (CM 221-22)
Through these second-hand tales Melville reflects upon the reproduction and passing on of knowledge, history, and ideology. Asked to repeat the story so often that he mastered its telling, the Judge seemed to be “talking for the press” — he was very “impressive” — and left an impression on “equally impressible” memory of his listeners. Melville’s insistence on the words “press” and “impress” connect with the overarching theme connecting the power of potions and wines with the power of ideology and media to
“impress” itself upon its audience which he develops in the discussion between the
“Boon Companions,” Frank and Charlie.16 Melville points to how ideology is disseminated and reproduced and how some narratives become authorized and disseminated while others are silenced. The character moved to narrate this tale is first described at length, as having a body that did not match his clothes (CM217-18).
Because repeated descriptions point to something vaguely contradictory in the guise and skin of the man, this is simultaneously a chapter which heightens the sense that one’s
16 The chapter entitled, “The Boon Companions,” presents a dizzing discussion between Frank and Charlie, two actors, who are revealed for the first time as having played in “an amateur play company,” seemingly try to pull a ruse on each other. This chapter echoes other chapters where the ruse of the confidence man falls short, but it also provides room for Melville to dissect the powers of the Press in a riddle which connects the Press to both intoxicating wine (pressed from grapes) and Media. The next chapter, as if ushered in by the break in the whiteness mirror performed by Frank and Charlie, addresses the nature of fictions and whether they can be salutary or even consistent. 59
impressions are open to influence and prey to fictions. One’s impressions are also deeply implicated in how one is positioned in the social order. “Ungracious critics” may see something entirely different than “gracious” ones - the same individual may appear either
“congenial” or “uncongenial” depending on one’s lens. (CM 218).
More importantly, here Melville points to a third possibility beyond the binary of fiction versus reality, and black versus white. Instead, we are dealing with a cosmopolitan character who is singularly different in how he responds to others: “But fortunately for better constructions, no such critics had the stranger now in eye; only the cosmopolitan”
(CM218). This cosmopolitan demonstrates two important traits that allow Melville to explode the binaries of his era. First, a seeming naivete or unwillingness to see bad in the world and second, a desire to hear and learn, to be told stories. Had the Cosmopolitan not asked for the story, it would not have been told in this vein: “Dear me...— But really, I would like to know something about this Indian-hating, I can hardly believe such a thing to be. Could you favor me with a little history of the extraordinary man you mentioned?”
(219-220) The incredulity of the Cosmopolitan allows Melville to present and dissect discourses of hate juxtaposed to discourses of seeming congeniality and equality thereby cutting to the heart of a racism which presents itself simultaneously as tolerant and civil.
It is significant that the rhetorical questions concerning Indian testimony occurs in a chapter deeply concerned with both the metaphysics of hatred, and the nature of how youth absorb narratives, of how ideology is passed on, learned, and imbibed. We can see
Melville developing a metaphysics in which, echoing de Beauvoir on women, Indian- 60
Haters are not bom, but rather made through a process learned in youth and solidified through experience. The Indian-Hater is “one who having with his mother’s milk drank in small love for red men,” becomes interpellated into a journey that takes him far from settlements and far from the normal course of life (221-222). The overall dialogic effect of both Benito Cereno and The Confidence-Man is to have readers see knowledge itself as a kind of performance, a genre of theater in which bodies get situated differently depending on whether their skins appear as black or white, but also based on the position and understanding of the viewer. The understanding of the viewer can be manipulated by well-placed stories. The commodification of being and of relations connects to the “word for word” ventriloquism of the second-hand story-telling that Melville presents in the metaphysics of Indian Hating and the story of China Aster. Melville draws attention to how an “original” narrative/ narrator is clearly present in contaminating how one thinks and reads what follows. Ventriloquism, thus, has a double path in Melville. It exists in a
Disguise in the Body, in performance, and in the presentation of the contamination via language and story that one person can exercise on another. Melville investigates ideology and the vying for control of narrative that is central to all ideological competition — which narrative (and thus which body) will prevail?
The Riddling Form o f Melville’s Masquerading Text
The Confidence-Man, the text, and the confidence men, the actors, riddle into imaginative experience a series of vaudeville-like sketches (including ventriloquist acts) which operate as frames for investigating performances of everyday life among the 61
strangers who become momentary neighbors as they inhabit and pass through public spaces.17 Like “The Protean Easy Chair” proposed by the man in grey, this narrative’s
“endlessly-changeable accommodations” speak to a variety of individuals and emotional terrains “giving rest” to “the most restless body” and the “most tormented conscience”
(59). This is a work that looks to how narratives play upon emotion and the need for connection. Each story investigates why people are prey to impostors while simultaneously presenting a compassionate eye to the individuals marked for both investigation and manipulation. The Confidence-Man asks what book would be a guide, like a map, through Boston, for a reader, for a studious youth? (106) In effect, Melville queries the relationship between our knowledge -- our sciences — and our culture and identity. What knowledge guides us? How do we learn? How do we navigate a city, an economy, a culture?
In chapter 14 - and its rippled echoes in chapters 33 and 44 - the narrator speaks directly to the reader about fiction, presenting arguments about authors, characters, and consistency much in the way that characters throughout the text argue about how to judge others onboard the Fidele. Here the narrator’s subject concerns how to read authors, texts, characters, and humanity itself. With the insertion of these chapters readers are brought
17 Ventriloquists in the 19th Century performed in vaudeville acts for entertainment, aligning themselves within a tradition of protean figures able to take on a variety of identities, splitting voice and body for the thrill of the crowd. From the 1840s to 1870, the period of the composition of The Confidence-Man. minstrel shows featuring white men performing in blackface grew in popularity with more than ten theaters in New York dedicated almost solely to minstrel shows. While in the West - which Melville takes as his canvas in The Confidence-Man — itinerant troupes traveled the countryside offering a variety of performances - comedic and musical - alongside of tonics, salves, and miraculous elixirs. 62
into the discourse, marked as readers of a fiction. The narrative engages with potential critiques or responses we may have to the text and its characters; but, it also provides useful riddles for engaging with the text more deeply. Chapter 14 operates referentially - and, seemingly, deferentially — as does the confidence-man himself -referring backwards and forwards to clues he has left in another episode, and another guise. Thus the relationship between chapters 13 and 14 performs for the reader, and to the reader, arguments concerning fiction and how to read inconsistency in character, what the confidence-man performs upon his many marks: a self-referential discourse that leaves us wondering — is this fiction genial? Is it selfish or altruistic, misanthropic or philanthropic, this fiction? and finally, are we selfish or altruistic, misanthropic or philanthropic, ourselves?
The circularity of the arguments presented to the reader in these chapters remains so ambiguous and slippery that one has to look outside of them for understanding. In this way, like any riddle, the text continually points to an imaginary third possibility not directly voiced in the text, which may in strictly logical terms confound existing analogies (just as Babo’s insurgency could not be spoken directly in Benito Cereno’s deposition without appearing to be stark raving mad.) In these chapters, Melville provides several clues to how readers can get out of the quandry of binaries - especially the one concerning whiteness and blackness. For example, in chapter 14, he deconstructs the example of the platypus which is shown to confound partial classifications. The narrator argues that to conclude “logically” that if something is (a) a beaver means that it cannot 63
also have (b) a duck bill is to miss the possibility that there is a third creature, a platypus, as yet unknown, in the existing classifications. We can extrapolate a corollary in response to the various moral quandries encountered on board the Fidele to say that if we imagine that if someone is (a) a good and honest person than they cannot also be (b) destitute and asking for money, then (c) we are falling prey to a simple ideological classification as equally toxic as any “Metaphysics of Indian-Hating.”
Throughout The Confidence-Man and its multiple conversations concerning good and evil, judgment and bias, Melville engages with some of the most toxic and bigoted mind-sets of his era, in order to try to dissect what allows them to function. He does so with a compassionate eye to a kind of “restorative justice” model where people would not need to fear and mistrust and hate each other but rather could engage in a game where all would win: “because games in which all may win, such games remain as yet in this world uninvented, I think" (62). Whatever the conclusion, readers come to concerning
Melville’s riddling masquerade - like the characters on board the Fidele - they will need to glance backwards as one does when one has a doubt of what one has just experienced, when there is some unease, or something incomplete. Again and again, after meeting with the various manifestations of the confidence-man, some of his interlocutors will awaken as from the effects of chloroform, or cast off the charm and find that indeed, they have been duped because in the words of confidence man, dressed as the philanthropist in the gray suit, commiserating with the clergyman “the spirit of distrust works something as certain potions do” (42). But, even then, some will wonder - as does the Missourian, 64
Pitch — if such a pantomime would really be got up for only a few dollars? And, another will tell us - as does the one-legged, “one-viewed” man: “Money, you think is the sole motive for pains and hazard, deception and deviltry, in this world? How much money did the devil make by gulling Eve?” (41). Thus, The Confidence-Man, in text and performance, insists that ideas can work like potions to affect our decisions and actions; while also intimating that money is not the only reason for such “gulling.” Taking these points, and applying them to the text-at-large, what is the ruse exercised on the reader, if any? Is this fiction creating a confidence game that is edifying?
The Confidence-Man, in text and performance, insists that ideas, narratives and performances can work like potions to affect our decisions and actions; while also intimating that money is not the only reason for such “gulling.”18 Taking these points, and applying them to the text-at-large, what is the ruse exercised on the reader? What happens when we juxtapose the Metaphysics of Indian Hating with Melville’s asides to readers? What happens when we juxtapose Black Guinea with Diogenes? The cosmopolitan with the Missourian? These questions provide our way into the double consciousness that Melville points to in a call and response rhetoric which represents the kind of surprising and inverting rhetoric one finds in jokes. Melville’s masquerades establish a cognitive dissonance in the receivers of the insurgency. This is what
Melville’s Soldier of Fortune means by dropping powder into the happy man’s conceptions of the world. On the one hand, in learning the story that lead to his current 65
disability, readers will learn about some of the fundamental injustices present in antebellum society, on the other hand, his position as an impostor, telling a tale of woe,
“sugared” for passengers demonstrates the degree to which the hypocrisies of the hegemonic realm translate into individual improvisations. Finally, Melville’s juxtapositions explode any idea of fundamental divisions between white and black, villain and sympathetic individual. In both the structure and content of The Confidence-
Man, Melville develops ventriloquism as an explicit metaphor and methodology for understanding how ideology and hatred, as well as conceptions of self and other, get passed on and reproduced by individuals. Throughout his works, Melville investigates how stories and understandings of who “we” are as a people get literally “impressed” on the minds and in the voices of individuals who reproduce culture and ideology with their own speech and judgments in stories designed to attract or repel.
Through the figure of Black Guinea and how he incites passengers on board to action, collapsed metaphorically with the figure of the Cosmopolitan, who interrogates passengers to investigate a more “genial” philosophy, Melville develops a ventriloquism which does not only operate (as it did in Benito Cereno) as a whiteface ventriloquism in which black actors speak through a white mask. Rather, the ventriloquism he points to in
The Confidence-Man goes beyond any specific bodily form, to focus on two central ways that stories infect individuals. On the one hand, several episodes investigate how a variety of protagonists change their stories (and their costumes) based on their assessment of their public’s receptivity. A notable case in point is that of the Soldier of Fortune who 66
admits that the truth is too unbelievable so he must change his story. On the other hand,
Melville investigates the voice and identity of hegemony showing how repeated and authorized/ authorial narratives can impress themselves on listeners who then pass them on, word for word, to others who may become equally infected.
Melville’s Masquerades: The Metaphysics of Producing Whiteness and Blackness
In The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, other than in the title, the word
“masquerade” only appears three times in the text. It appears first in reference to a discussion about Black Guinea in which passengers interrogate whether this black cripple is “what he seems to be?” Further still, they wonder is he: “A white masquerading as a black?” (48) The second appearance of the word masquerade occurs in a disagreement between two apparently well-to-do merchants where one accuses the other of being a
Diogenes in disguise: “Won't do. You are Diogenes, Diogenes in disguise. I say—
Diogenes masquerading as a cosmopolitan” (215). Finally, as a glaring reminder that as readers we are engaged in an elaborate and uncertain riddle, the last word of this episodic work is “masquerade,” teaching us that no conclusion has been reached and that the
Masquerade may go on: “something further may follow of this Masquerade” (394). The questions surrounding 1) the characters of Black Guinea and Diogenes, 2) of who masques in the text, and, 3) what exactly one means by Masquerade provide a way to cut an interpretive narrative through the mise en abime complexity Melville has crafted. On the one hand, Melville creates an insurgency on readers’ mindsets by creating uncertainty 67
around whether a black man may or may not be posing as a white man, or a white man may or may not be posing as a black man. By collapsing easy distinctions between racialized bodies, Melville points to how race and racism operate within both readers’ and passengers’ conceptions of self and order. On the other, with a wink to the “cynical” philosopher, Diogenes’ statement that he was both a “dog” and a “cosmopolitan,” a citizen of the world, we have the image of a “philosopher masquerading as a cosmopolitan.”
Philosophers masquerading as cosmopolitans and whites masquerading as blacks. Race and philosophy appear as the two “foundational” and “delirious” poles of The Confidence-
Man, just as they are in modernity and in Mbembe’s Critique o f Black Reason. Melville’s work points to who each one of us, as a body, is open to interpellation within racializing structures and, thus, we are all implicated - for better or for worse — in the structures of thought and the narratives of subjection operative in modernity.
The question of Guinea begins with the question of “what” he is and turns quickly to the notion of “acting” and of performing a part as another one-legged man indicates that
Guinea is a white man masquerading as a black man :
“A white masquerading as a black?”
“Exactly.”
.... “—Tell me, sir, do you really think that a white could look the negro so? For
one, I should call it pretty good acting.” (48)
Here, the simple facts of the discussion, then, would hold that it is either possible or impossible for a white man to convincingly play the role of a black man. But, the 68
interlocutor parries with the kind of relativistic doubt that we will come to see as typical of
The confidence-man’s approach pointing to the fact that everyone on earth is an actor:
"Yes, don't you both perform acts? To do, is to act; so all doers are actors." The confidence-man is able to philosophize everything into an equalizing abstraction. All of us act, therefore, all of our roles and guises and identities are nothing but acts. But his interlocutor is not so easily tranquilized: “You trifle,” he responds, bringing the discussion back to the case at hand, in regards specifically to race: “You trifle.—I ask again, if a white, how could he look the negro so?” The interlocutor’s answer is a simple one — phrased as a question which points to the other’s potential lack of experience: “Never saw the negro-minstrels, I suppose?” Yes, the other has seen them, and has not been impressed by their “acting”: “Yes, but they are apt to overdo the ebony; exemplifying the old saying, not more just than charitable, that ‘the devil is never so black as he is painted.’ But his limbs, if not a cripple, how could he twist his limbs so?” (48-9). Thus, for one man, this
Guinea cannot be a white man in disguise, but must truly be a black cripple. He is either an authentic victim with a body marked and produced by the familiar wounds of capitalism, slavery, and war. Or, perhaps he is a very good actor, commodifying himself for a few coins, playing upon the familiar disabilities ascribed to blackness within colonial slavery? In either case, Guinea’s perceived blackness and disability point to an
“uneliminable surplus” in the metaphysics of the social order (Mbembe 46). Guinea both represents containment and something which cannot be contained. He is a supposed black-man (is he a black man or a white man in black face?) who operates in a world 69
where his reality will be doubted as theater and/or where his theater will be mistaken as reality. The crowd displaces its need to judge him onto another authority who will tell them how to apprehend this black man: “Before giving you our confidence,” said a third,
“we will wait the report of the kind gentleman who went in search of one of your friends who was to speak for you.” ( 22-3) In presenting a discussion about minstrelsy, the reality that white men regularly performed in blackface, appropriating and expropriating black plantation culture for cash, Melville situates himself in a novel that exists as a kind of critically humorous, but deadly serious, ethnography of the present. His characters examine issues that might have proven difficult (or unlikely) for “genteel” or passing strangers to discuss: “do you really think that a white could look the negro so?” The doubt present in the passengers extends also to that of the readers -- we are encouraged to look at the roles that each personality performs as it meets and discourses with strangers, but in particular we are encouraged to look at how each character seeks to either make a profit for himself or make a commodity of himself.
One of the central questions of the text is who exactly is the confidence-man - is he the Cosmopolitan, is he Black Guinea, is he the deaf-mute, or is he all of the above and more? In my reading, the confidence-man is not one person but rather a series of people. There may even be a troupe of actors working together. The reader cannot be certain of anyone’s identity in this text. On the one hand, it is not clear whether any single being presented onboard the Fidele presents his or her true self. But further still,
Melville raises the possibility that a troupe of actors may be operating in cahoots on 70
board the Fidele. This possibility is not raised directly by the text much in the same way that the possibility of a collaborative insurgency is suppressed in both Benito Cereno and
“The Bell-Tower.” Yet, the possibility is unavoidably present. How often did Minstrel or
Vaudeville actors work alone? The elided, unvoiced possibility of a troupe of actors, operating as so many confidence-men reminds us that any potential collaborative revolt haunts modernity. Furthermore, the corollary that race is not a stable - or even biologically real — category also haunts modernity.
In The Confidence-Man, however, Melville introduces a third possibility, one in which it becomes possible to see the elaborate stories engaged in by motivated narrators as offering a compassionate alternative to their interlocutors. When we know the injustices an individual has faced, do we judge their so-called criminal actions in a different light?
Performance and theatricality can disturb viewers and readers — but may not lead to revelations that allow them to judge clearly and fairly. This doubt is doubly suggested to the readers in the fact that Captain Delano both sees and understands the theatricality orchestrated by Babo but cannot understand it. In The Confidence-Man, readers find ourselves faced with the dilemma for which we will never have an answer - is Black
Guinea a black man or a white man in black face? Is he an authentic cripple? Just as Black
Guinea (as either impostor/actor or authentic person) faces a situation where either 1) his reality is doubted as theater or, 2) his theater is doubted as reality, readers become unable to distinguish theater from reality. Reality is shown to be theatrical at the same time that it is real. Furthermore, we are introduced to a crowd which “could not resist to opportunity 71
of acting the part” of “justiciaries” before displacing its need to judge onto another authority, another set of authorized actors (20). On the slave ship, doubts are dismissed as whimsy because Captain Delano’s belief in the total submission of black slaves to their masters cannot see Babo as a “Jeremy Diddler” or a potential subversive. On the antebellum ferry boat, no one is entirely sure who or what to trust and most want to keep an idea of their good-natured freedom intact, so judgment (though deemed necessary) is suspended and put on another presumed authority’s, shoulders: “we will wait the report of the kind gentleman who went in search of one of your friends who was to speak for you”
(CM 23).
A fantasy of an all-knowing being, able to unmask all operations, and to see the mechanisms in operation behind the scenes dominated much of 19th Century literature in the figure of Asmodeus, a supreme demon who was also commonly represented as a demon walking on two crutches.19 The Herb Doctor (who represents one of the text’s most sympathetic and confounding incarnations of the confidence-man) asks whether it be a “fair thing in Asmodeus” to reveal the “true thoughts and designs of all operators”:
“Supposing that at high 'change on the Paris Bourse, Asmodeus should lounge in, distributing hand-bills, revealing the true thoughts and designs of all the operators present—would that be the fair thing in Asmodeus?” (137) This theme of Exposure - tied to pamphlets distributed in a crowd, and the question of whether it is fair to expose an
1 including Asmodeus in his text represents, perhaps, another wink from Melville to the disabled demons — like Black Guinea and The Soldier of Fortune — encoded within his ironic masquerade of Antebellum Liberalism’s blindspot. These figures reveal the inconsistencies and hypocrisy in a philosophy of equality and unity. 72
operator - appears elsewhere in The Confidence-Man but most predominantly in one of the saddest stories of injustice that percolate the text, that of the Soldier of Fortune.
Because his true story is too unbelievable, we learn that the Soldier of Fortune “sugars” hard stories, telling a story just believable enough that it wins him a few coins of silver:
“Hardly anybody believes my story, and so to most I tell a different one.” The Herb
Doctor - who himself confounds passengers by trying to give away money in charity, calling out to anyone in need of help — defends the Soldier of Fortune not as a liar but as a philosopher doing what he must to survive: “A ripe philosopher, turned out of the great
Sorbonne of hard times, he thinks that woes, when told to strangers for money, are best sugared. ... this lighter and false ill shall attract, while the heavier and real one might repel" (CM 150-1). Melville’s masquerade reminds us that stories have the ability to either repel or attract, to benefit or disrupt both individuals and crowds.
The Pedagogy o f Uncertainty: Masks, Doubles, and Simulacrum
The different positions occupied by the already-commodified Black Guinea and those who seek to commodify themselves as white men raise important theoretical revelations concerning personhood in liberal capitalist worlds. To read doubles, masks and simulacrum, according to Achille Mbembe, is to already be within the frameworks of racism. Operating under a similar understanding of how power and ideology translate into individual identity, Melville’s stories make use of doubles in order to introduce uncertainty. From the moment readers enter on board both The Fidele and The San
Dominick, they are not sure what the relations between black and white characters 73
actually are; indeed, in the case of Black Guinea and the nameless deaf-mute (startling in his “lamby” whiteness) we also aren’t sure about whether their racial characteristics are authentic. As Mbembe reminds us, “If there is one thing that haunts modernity from beginning to end, it is the possibility of that singular event, the “revolt of the slaves.” A slave uprising signals not only liberation but also radical transformation, if not of the system of property and labor itself, then at least of the mechanisms of its redistribution and so of the foundations for the reproduction of life itself’ (Mbembe:37). It is this potential revolt of the slaves, and the transformation of systems of skin and property that
Black Guinea’s role (doubled in the Cosmopolitan) refigures. How each character navigates the radical freedom of this world of commodified selves and the necessity to play its roles appears not only in the “low” role of the homeless Black Guinea but also in the flamboyant discourses of the astute, and clearly white “cosmopolitan” philosopher.
The second appearance of the word “masquerade” brings cosmopolitanism and philosophy into play, in ways that reference Ancient Greece, misanthropy, and philanthropy, the possibility of brotherhood, and the possibility of disguise and mistrust.
If we assume that Ancient Greece and Diogenes are both classed unequivocally within the Antebellum U.S.20 as representing Western Civilization as birthed through the
Republics and Democracies of Rome and Greece, marked thus unequivocally as white and civilized, then, Melville is playful and vertiginous here in his references, which fold
20 The historiography which establishes Whiteness via a lens of Western Civilization still exists today in how history courses are taught in the U.S. - or, at least, this historiography still remains unquestioned and taught in some places. 74
back into each other because, in their apparent differences, a same is revealed in which
Diogenes, Black Guinea, and Cosmopolitanism all collapse in upon each other as so many elements of the same idea. Diogenes is known as a “cosmopolitan” philosopher, calling himself a “citizen of the world,” and who embraced a simple life as a beggar, eschewing luxury. In this way, Diogenes (and thus the Cosmopolitan) can also be apprehended as Black Guinea, who lives as a beggar on the street and who is a citizen of no state and a dog with no master. From the moment he appears, Black Guinea is described as being similar in stature and demeanor to a Newfoundland dog — “In short, as in appearance he seemed a dog, so now, in a merry way, like a dog he began to be treated” (CA/13). The reference doubles here as a familiar racial slur -- in which blacks can be insulted as no more than dogs — but the reference also points to a more elevated reference in the figure of the philosopher, Diogenes, himself, who — in addition to having been sold into slavery at one point in his life — was known to call himself a dog.21
Furthermore, in chapter 14, The Confidence-Man 's unnamed narrator talks of moving from "the comedy of thought" to the "comedy of action" and Diogenes believed that virtue is more readily revealed in actions than in theory. What kind of masquerade is
Melville putting on with this vertiginous self-referential play in which cynical philosophers masquerade as a black with no master? Guinea is after all “so low” as a cripple that no gentleman would want his legs but could he be seen as a cosmopolitan philosopher? What racial economy could see Black Guinea as a Diogenes and thus a
21 “I am Diogenes the Dog. I nuzzle the kind, bark at the greedy and bite scoundrels.” 75
Cosmopolitan in disguise? By never letting readers (or passengers) ascertain whether the character in question - Black Guinea or Diogenes— is black or white, Melville leaves the question of race open and unidentifiable, breaking the binary between black and white to point to the underlying structures of how individuals are categorized. By pointing to the mutually constitutive spheres of blackness and whiteness, master and slave, Melville addresses the economies (which he suggests might be diabolical) which narrate race into existence. What, then, would be the function of unmasking Black Guinea’s whiteness or blackness? What would be the good of unmasking any operator? On the one hand, the collapsing masquerade points to how bodies do not register equally within the hegemonic violence of racist structures. For example, to what degree could black people be cosmopolitan travelers in the antebellum world of slavery? Or, in the current world of white supremacy where innocent black people are often murdered (in deaths that the social order finds ways to overlook) simply because they are coded as “nobody” or as
“dangerous” and “criminal” bodies within the frameworks “which defend class at all costs” and where real people “become like characters in a national morality play with so many rich ironies and plot twists, so many double meanings in the language of its participants, that it [is] hard not to feel that we [are] witnessing the playing out of a civic parable” (Lamont Hill:xx,12)? Being able to pass as white can have its uses, Melville shows. But whiteness as it plays out in such civic parables also cannot exist without the blackness it both invents and excludes, as it invents and includes itself. 76
By raising the doubt that a black face may be operating behind a white mask,
Melville interrogates justice and injustice through the lens of race, pointing to an oppositional jurisprudence based on a desire for compearance - for games in which all may win — rather than the disciplinary apparatuses that stratify society into races the better to enslave and divide (Nancy: 61). By never letting readers (or passengers) ascertain whether the person in question is black or white, Melville leaves the question of race open and unidentifiable, breaking the binary between black and white to point to the underlying structures of how individuals are categorized. By pointing to the mutually constitutive spheres of blackness and whiteness, master and slave, Melville addresses the economies (which he suggests might be diabolical) which narrate race into existence simultaneously giving voice to white bodies and silencing black bodies.
Finally, Melville reads whiteness as itself a discourse of denial and repression. And, this is where the second masquerader appears in the form of Frank, the Cosmopolitan
Philosopher, Guinea’s inverted white double. This cosmopolitan character appears to have many doubles. Chapters 29 and 30, where Charlie, Frank, and Egbert appear, are dizzying to read. The change in address — calling Frank sometimes “the cosmopolitan” and sometimes “Frank” -- in addition to the similarities between Charlie, Frank, and Egbert make it difficult to decide which one is “the confidence man.” Are they all confidence men? What is happening? As readers, we watch them as closely as they watch each other, trying to ascertain the sub-text, and to see when the punch-line will come. It finally comes 77
when Charlie learns that Frank wants money. From the start of the text, it was clear that
Black Guinea wants money. He is marked explicitly as a disabled beggar. That “want” makes him abject but his skin color and disability already make that abjection (itself encoded as a want of money) clear. For white characters, their skin color does not automatically signify the ultimate disability and horror of this text, which is to be without money. In the various moments where the Cosmopolitan (whose clothes and skin-color represent ease, confidence, and which thus convey “money”) reveals himself to be in need, his interlocutors react with horror and dismay. They fault him for “misrepresenting” himself. Hearing that Charlie wants money, Frank cries: “Oh, this, all along, is not you,
Charlie, but some ventriloquist who usurps your larynx. It is Mark Winsome that speaks, not Charlie”(325). Thus, the theme of “usurped larynxes” and misrepresentation dramatized in both Benito Cereno and “The Bell-Tower” also appears in the exploration of identities and performances that Melville elaborates in The Confidence Man: His
Masquerade. Only here, in The Confidence Man, the notion of usurped larynxes appears as a protest from Frank Goodman, who cannot believe his “boon companion” is asking him for money. Thus, within the context of Melville’s dialogue between Charlie and Frank, this line about possessed larynxes operates simply as a way to dismiss an unwelcome message, to dismiss the revelation of an unwelcome poverty in one presumed to be equal.22 Frank —
22In the voice of his master, Mark Winsome, Frank explains that he chooses friends for the silver in their pocket: “there seemed in you, the schoolboy who always had silver in his pocket, a reasonable probability that you would never stand in lean need of fat succor..”(CM: 323) 78
and other characters aboard The Fidele — effectively represent an insurgency when they ask for money. The extreme reactions that characters in The Confidence Man resort to when asked for money are an underlying clue to this complex text and they are the fundamental link -- along with the figures of blackness, theatrical troupes (or groups of actors) and ventriloquism — between The Confidence Man and Benito Cereno.
In this moment where whiteness meets its double, the text and the confidence man himself entertain a new genre not yet so explicitly presented, that of spectacular performance that evokes the power of magicians and actors to woo a crowd. (282) The
Boon Companion “stood suddenly rapt, exhibiting every symptom of a successful charm— a turned cheek, a fixed attitude, a frozen eye; spellbound, not more by the waving wand than by the ten invincible talismans on the floor”(282). Perhaps it is the sight of the coins
—which reveal his friend is not in need - that returns the boon companion to his jovial form after this “spell,” encouraging them to return to joyfully drinking and conversing. In the next moment, both Frank and Charlie ascribe their conversation as nothing but “a joke” —
“never did man second a joke better than you did just now. You played your part better than I did mine; you played it, Charlie, to the life." ... "You see, I once belonged to an amateur play company”(CM 282). Each apparently takes the moment of disarray, of dispute and horror in true improvisational stride, furthering the joke in order, perhaps, to better gull the other. The entire exchange where two actors, who are revealed for the first time as having played in “an amateur play company,” seemingly try to pull a ruse on each other — echoes other chapters where the ruse of the confidence man falls short, but it also 79
provides room for Melville to dissect the powers of the Press — of advertisers — or of authors like himself and Shakespeare to offer “salutary narratives.” The next chapter, as if ushered in by the break in the whiteness mirror performed by Frank and Charlie, addresses the nature of fictions and whether they can be “salutary” or even consistent.
Games in which all may win: Insurgent Mindsets
“Suggestive Dubiety,” a theme which occurs throughout Melville’s works (e.g.
“Bartleby,” Benito Cereno and Billy Budd, Sailor), recurs with masterful purpose in The
Confidence-Man, with a difference that reveals the work of the rest, showing perhaps that
Melville’s work operates within a field of serial uncertainty, seeking something not yet written or lived. As the narrator explains in chapter 33 of The Confidence-Man: “the people in the fiction, like the people in a play, must dress as nobody exactly dresses, talk as nobody exactly talks, act as nobody exactly acts. It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie” (158). And, further still, a character (about to be duped into trusting the confidence-man) avers that “games in which all may win, such games remain as yet in this world uninvented, I think" (62). We can see Melville leaning towards imagining a world where such equalizing games exist — where narratives (and perhaps advertisements and newspapers as well) can be salutary.
The radical freedom of the world of The Confidence-Man — the commercial vessel, The Fidele —contrasts to the hegemonic and totalitarian regimes of the slave ship, the San Dominick, and the military rule of the Bellipotent where Billy Budd, sailor, was 80
unable to narrate himself out of execution. Reading that this text is about radical freedom may be jarring as in fact, race, racism and the shadow of slavery (both wage and chattel) are everywhere in The Confidence-Man. As Carolyn L. Karcher argues, in Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America, racism — and the racist views of antebellum characters — are constantly interrogated by Melville in The
Confidence-Man. As much as Melville explores how an individual’s worth is monetized in social terms, he also explores the power of dialogue to influence and change people’s perceptions. He reminds characters to pause and reflect, just as the confidence-man gives
“the good merchant” pause to express his doubts and to notice how his doubts dissipate when shared:
Well, I see it's good to out with one's private thoughts now and then. Somehow, I
don't know why, a certain misty suspiciousness seems inseparable from most of
one's private notions about some men and some things; but once out with these
misty notions, and their mere contact with other men's soon dissipates, or, at least,
modifies them. (CM:83)
The stories of the confidence-man not only operate like chloroform, they make characters feel “alive” — they feel “trustful” and “genial” (80). They can be healed by a sympathetic and truthful discussion: "stay, stay! You have made a better man of me. You have borne with me like a good Christian, and talked to me like one, and all that is enough without making me a present of these boxes. Here is the money. I won't take nay. There, there; and may Almighty goodness go with you" (155) With these instances of stories 81
helping dispel suspicions and bring people together, Melville (and the confidence-man through him) diagnose a culture and an individual’s need for connection, for being heard, for thinking and feeling in connection with others: “this ode...works on my numbness not unlike a sermon..( 8 0 ) . This power of story can be used for good or for bad. It is ultimately a tool — and it is to the powerful ambiguities of this tool that Melville points throughout his masquerade. Through these examples we can see how in the work of the text, there is a deliberately ambivalent compassion held out to those who must tell stories for money. The ambivalence is constructed to have us witness a binary of Either/Or - either someone’s narrative is salutary or it is not - before witnessing a third possibility which we ourselves must name, decoding the playful riddles of the text which point to a voice and a possibility not yet on any map, but which might exist were we able to name it, perform it, and pass it on.
Who is he?: “The Black Man is what one sees when one wishes to see nothing”
The moment Black Guinea appears on board The Confidence-Man, the nature of his identity and the manner of identifying “who he is” comes squarely into question by the passengers, while suspicion itself comes into question by a particularly wiley passenger, who himself (with his wooden leg) appears as a shadow double of Black
Guinea, raising the question and the possibility that the confidence-man may have partners, intentionally crafted doubles, with whom he stages pantomimes.23 For the
23 The many injured, wooden-legged, and hobbled men of the text - Pitch, The Soldier of Fortune, Black Guinea - point to the prevalence of disability within the brutal capitalisms (so deeply tied to war and 82
confidence-men, as for Melville, what is the hope in establishing a parallelism between the two poles of whiteness and blackness, of popular culture and high philosophy? What is the hope in disclosing how some people are in want of money, or want of justice, while others are in want of charity, or trust? Like the confidence-man who pushes his interlocutors to address questions of giving and receiving, the pantomime that Melville engages will question everything both sacrosanct and profane pushing readers to think beyond good and evil, black and white, and Either/Or. Carolyn Karcher’s analysis goes further still in tracing Black Guinea’s role as revealing the black man’s role as both
“America’s chief victim” and “her apocalyptic nemesis like Babo and the robot Haman”
(195). In the complex interrelationship that Karcher identifies between “victim and inquisitor” in Babo, the robot Haman (whose being may or may not have been formed from the blood of a murdered worker), and Black Guinea, we can see Melville investigating the power of a symbolic body to tear at the core fabric of myths but also at the core apparatus of labor. But further still readers - like the passengers interrogating
Black Guinea — get put in the position of witnesses for the prosecution as the inconsistencies and subterfuges of documents and discourses rankle senses of fair play and justice.
slavery) of the day at the same time that they establish affinities and doubles. The Herb Doctor makes a connection between the injuries of the Soldier of Fortune and that of the “black cripple” making this parallel still more human as he doctored both and was (apparently) compassionate to both. In addition to raising the possibility that the Herb Doctor is simply the same man who played Black Guinea in another disguise, the juxtaposition of these characters points to how we recognize goodness and authenticity in others. What makes anyone doubt the Herb Doctor’s altruism, Black Guinea’s blackness and disability, or the Soldier of Fortune’s true story? 83
What does the representation of a black body on a steamboat — appearing simultaneously as a Devil and as a “colored person” reveal about the diacritics of the age in which
Melville wrote The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade? Juxtaposing Melville’s tale in which a colored-person — and perhaps a Devil -- a cosmopolitan (or perhaps a
Diogenes?) — interrogates the political and economic commitments and social intimacies of its passengers with Frank Leslie's illustration “The Devil to Pay on Board the
Steamboat “Confederate States” — Last Boat up Salt River,” allows us to see some of the codes in play concerning commodified and monstrous bodies in Antebellum America. In
Frank Leslie’s illustration, issued in 1862, 5 years after the publication of The
Confidence-Man, the white figures on board unambiguously represent both white men and states. Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas, and Alabama all appear on the names of the hats of white passengers. The black body, by contrast, has many names and appears with ambiguous significance. This black body is first of all black, second of all appears coded as a Devil (with its scaly skin and tail), and third of all, it is a laboring body collecting tickets, while finally the epitaph labels the figure as a “Colored person.” Just as in Frank Leslie’s illustration the black Devil is ambiguous and multi faceted, so Black Guinea appears explicitly as an identity to question and theorize. He is seen as playing a role by which he seeks to commodify himself -- opening his mouth to receive pennies -- but also a role to be pitied, to be simultaneously humiliated. Who is he? The question is asked. It is important this question be answered. Everyone agrees.
The passengers onboard create a court in which to judge his identity. They send men off 84
in search for proof of his identity. For Melville’s narrator, this moment appears as a moment when the passengers begin to “act the part” of citizen-judge, of justiciary (CM
17). In the trial of Black Guinea, Melville points to a world in which every individual must navigate race. He points to the radical dangers of a social world in which human bodies can be commodified and sold because of the color of their skin. Simultaneously, he points to a world where bodies can appear as other than they are, creating theaters advertising both counterfeits and authenticity, revolution and oppression. Finally, like these passengers who “cannot resist acting the part” of a “justiciary,” Melville puts readers into the place of justiciaries, asking us not to “stand by” and have our “fellow- feelings touched” by an alleged criminal, but to exercise judgement, and to see whether one’s judgments can have a positive influence. Beyond dissecting characters and their needs, Melville investigates the nature of fiction, itself, as when educated characters in chapter 33 dissect the works of Shakespeare, reasoning that authors don’t need to be
“arraigned,” but their characters -- in this case a criminal and clown, the thief, Autolycus
— can be “canvassed” and may be seen to be more “salutary” in fiction than they ever could be as ‘flesh-and-blood’:
Shakespeare himself is to be adored, not arraigned; but, so we do it with humility,
we may a little canvass his characters. There’s his Autolycus now, a fellow that
has always puzzled me. How is one to take Autolycus?...It may be, that in the
paper-and-ink investiture of his, Autolycus acts more effectively upon mankind
than he would in a flesh-and-blood one. Can his influence be salutary? (269) 86
Engaged thus with the “salutary” potential of narrative, the text and narrator of The
Confidence-Man invite us to “arraign” not only a particular confidence man, but an entire society — an entire “psychological theology” based on slavery and No Trust. As we saw in “The Bell-Tower” and Benito Cereno any disclosures lead to further uncertainties. The question of whether “disclosures” can ever be entirely salutary permeates the text of The
Confidence-Man in a series of instances where “disclosures” induce either pity or horror.
The question of whether “disclosures” can ever be entirely salutary permeates the text of
The Confidence-Man in a series of instances where “disclosures” induce either pity or horror. Melville showcases how disclosures can inspire the hearer to give alms (32). In other instances, a merchant who spoke in confidence walks away with a “mortified” air at having shared the “unaccountable caprices of his natural heart in mad disclosures” (102).
While finally, those who show themselves to be in “want of money” appear as “suddenly- disclosed man-traps” (281) presenting frighteningly “cold-blooded disclosures” of poverty.
The effects of literary works and power of dialogue are made explicit in the conversation between two key confidence men - the Cosmopolitan and his “boon companion.” As the two men try to outwit and dispossess each other through drink and cigars, we understand the discourse of the Cosmopolitan as humorously ironic. As he pretends to be puzzled, we presume that he has no pretention to truly having confidence or trust. But, the reflections these two weave about literary characters and authors’ intent 87
can be brought to bear on The Confidence-Man as a work itself and Melville’s intentions as an author:
Some say that he meant them to open other people’s eyes;... others say he meant
to corrupt people’s morals; and still others, that he had no express intention at all,
but in effect opens their eyes and corrupts their morals in one operation. All of
which I reject. (177)
Is Melville, as author, opening eyes, corrupting, empty of intent, giving the “true light”?
Whatever the case, the conversation, though passionate, remains inconclusive - the conversation, like most episodes in this text, is “at once enlightening and mystifying.”
Melville has set up any critic who would face this text as just another commentator in a slew of commentators. The tale composed of stories, interpretations, judgments, and arguments often recounted second-hand, verbatim in another’s style, creates a lens that points outward to the culture in which it exists and inward as a mirror which points back to readers. The narrative presents an epistemological quest which makes us think about how we think. And, it reminds us that any discussion and any text (whether literary or journalistic) can be as dangerous to our clear-thinking as too much wine. There is no final answer except perhaps that we are serially in disguise and serially fools and, even so, our thoughts and words have powerful impact on how we live and what we become.
Advertising revolution and radical freedom: the other side o f doubt 88
A plethora of interpretations can stem from Frank Leslie’s image, with its enigmatic references to steamboats and civil war, and the slew of advertisements that surround it. On the one hand we have dire and dangerous politics -- references to slavery and to civil unrest — on the other we have champagne, artificial limbs, and 10,000 watches. Melville could have written — and in some episodes he does - The Confidence-
Man: His advertisements. In Frank Leslie’s paper, from “Artificial Legs” to “How to
Mix Drinks” and “Ward’s Perfect Fitting Shirts,” we are in a world facing not only slavery and political strife but also a world that promises satisfaction to some, and the prospect of devalued work to others. In the advertisements for everything from “Chinese
Life Pills” for the “Nervous and Debilitated” to “Hair Dye” and “Unguent for Luxuriant
Whiskers,” we can almost hear the confidence-man offering this or that panacea in one of his disguises or ploys. Each one of the confidence-man’s characters could be an advertisement made flesh. In Frank Leslie’s paper, several advertisements call out to
Agents, who, for a fee, can become sales agents.
Wanted— AGENTS, Ladies or Gentlemen. We guarantee satisfaction. A private circular sent on receipt of one stamp. Ladies are making money in the business. Address S. CLOUGH, Agent, Providence R.I.24
These primary documents reveal new possibilities for “ladies” who “are making money in the business.” We might imagine a confidence (wo)man, or Melville, reading these
24 p. 159, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper June 7, 1862. 89
ads, purchasing samples, and inventing narratives that “attract” rather than “repel.”
Perhaps the Herb Doctor on the Fidele once read or posted an ad like this one:
Something New. AGENTS WANTED, Local and Travelling to sell 12 new articles of rare merit. Sales and profits large. Samples 25 cts. Inclose stamp. Rice & Co., N.Y., or Chicago, 111.
Physical objects are not the only commodities or desires on the market. Another primary document indicates that one could mail away for a pamphlet offering in “plain, common- sense directions” “a curious, scientific experiment” on the art of “fascinating any person you wish” in order to make matrimony easy or win a lover :
Matrimony made easy; or, How to Win a Lover. -- Containing plain, common- sense directions, showing how all may be suitably married, irrespective of age, sex or position, whether prepossessing or otherwise, with a treatise on the art of fascinating any person you wish — a curious, scientific experiment which never fails. Free for 25 cts. Address T. William & Co., Publishers, Box 2,300 Philadelphia, (p. 159, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper June 7, 1862).
The intersection of science and common-sense with promises of marriage and fascination offer prescient insight into some of the tensions, and desires, of the age. Melville gives these tensions and desires a stage on board La Fidele. Between hoax and invention of new games, advertisements and newspapers figure in a realm which has the power to disseminate culture and monetize narratives in new and powerful ways.
In “At the limits of Identity: Realism and American Personhood in Melville’s
Confidence Man,” Rachel Cole argues that Melville redefines realism and shows the self as “anything but autonomous” (385). Cole’s work goes beyond seeing an aporia or 90
“absence of identity” at the core of The Confidence-Man, presenting an alternative reading of Melville as offering “a model of personhood that challenges our assumptions about the peculiar difficulties posed by social life in a free country” (385). Like Cole, 1 see Melville as developing a kind of realism in The Confidence-Man, “The Bell-Tower,” and Benito Cereno which asks us to investigate the very nature of narrative and the limits and purpose of our detecting abilities. In the enigmatic scene where the Cosmopolitan engages the only officially sanctioned working man of the ferry — the barber -Melville pulls out all the stops in referencing the metaphysical limits of the Cosmopolitan’s willingness to evoke an otherness that is at turns diabolical and at turns revolutionary. When the Cosmopolitan declares — “Only a man?... You can conclude nothing absolute from the human form, barber” (352) — we can hear a deconstructive mindset at work, but also the rhetorical destabilization that is the Cosmopolitan’s goal.
He seeks to contradict and confound, to confute all arguments, as he repeats joyfully to the barber — “You stand self-contradicted, barber!” and “I have confuted you!” (352).
Here the Cosmopolitan (and the confidence-men of the Fidele) are Melville’s perfect ally in disruptive fiction, showing that one can doubt totalizing philosophies of mankind while nonetheless drawing inferences from styles of talk and sorts of dress: “But I can conclude something from that sort of talk, with that sort of dress,” shrewdly thought the barber (352). Melville’s works ask readers to investigate the very basis of our detecting abilities as evidenced with the playful ruse that one might purchase a “counterfeit 91
detector” while simultaneously pointing to the possibility that the counterfeit detectors - and our own conclusions — may themselves be false (389).
Melville’s work help us witness the possibility present in narratives of possession and liberation. Babo and the crew of freed slaves depended on creating a good story and performance (and manipulating all involved into being good actors within their play) in order to liberate themselves. Likewise, the many confidence men on board the Fidele depend upon creating well-crafted scenes and speeches in order to receive ‘donations’ to their wallets. Melville creates worlds where narrative can be productive or disabling. In his focus on the intimacies of power and narrative, Melville draws attention to a process and a genealogy of liberalism that Lisa Lowe presents in The Intimacies o f Four
Continents. Rather than following the self-serving genteel policy of ignoring the connections between wealth and poverty, slavery and freedom, Melville, like Lowe, makes “legible the forced encounters, removals, and entanglements omitted in liberal accounts of abolition, emancipation, and independence.” Like Lowe, Melville “devise[s] other ways of reading so that we might understand the processes through which the forgetting of violent encounter is naturalized, both by the archive, and in the subsequent narrative histories” (2). For Lowe, “even the questions we can ask are influenced... by
[the] obscured conditions” upon which our uneven identities as laborers, as citizens, and as racialized bodies are constructed. Her process points to how we can break into a different understanding, and thus identity. Melville operates a similar insurgency on received modes of apprehending self and other, labor and identity, skin and humanity and 92
crafts a narrative mode that attempts to reveal doubts, interrupt certitude, and point towards a yet unknown and unnamed possibility which has not been written yet. Melville presents the troubled and troubling relationships of slavery via inversion, in the form of masterful-slaves and dependent-masters, thereby unmasking the fictions behind hegemonic lenses which depicts slaves as without intelligence or volition. Melville’s narratives leave readers within the trouble of contradictions as he unmasks hegemony, but unlike the victims of his tales, the reader may retain the power to speak to and overturn the system which seeks to silence some voices, some bodies, and some insurgencies. 93
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